New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving 3030723232, 9783030723231

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New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving Edited by  Simon Cushing

New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving

Simon Cushing Editor

New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving

Editor Simon Cushing University of Michigan–Flint Flint, MI, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-72323-1    ISBN 978-3-030-72324-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72324-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Sergio Amiti / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Thomas and Frederick, because some love is simple and obvious. Jami too, even though she doesn’t believe in the stuff

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Simon Cushing 2 Making Room for Love in Kantian Ethics 25 Ernesto V. Garcia 3 Iris Murdoch and the Epistemic Significance of Love 39 Cathy Mason 4 ‘Love’ as a Practice: Looking at Real People 63 Lotte Spreeuwenberg 5 Love, Choice, and Taking Responsibility 87 Christopher Cowley 6 Not All’s Fair in Love and War: Toward Just Love Theory101 Andrew Sneddon 7 Doubting Love125 Larry A. Herzberg 8 Love and Free Agency151 Ishtiyaque Haji

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CONTENTS

9 Sentimental Reasons171 Edgar Phillips 10 Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Enticing Reasons for Love195 N. L. Engel-Hawbecker 11 Love, Motivation, and Reasons: The Case of the Drowning Wife215 Monica Roland 12 Can Our Beloved Pets Love Us Back?241 Ryan Stringer 13 Romantic Love Between Humans and AIs: A Feminist Ethical Critique269 Andrea Klonschinski and Michael Kühler 14 Patriotism and Nationalism as Two Distinct Ways of Loving One’s Country293 Maria Ioannou, Martijn Boot, Ryan Wittingslow, and Adriana Mattos Index315

Notes on Contributors

Martijn  Boot  is an assistant professor at the University of Groningen. Prior to coming to Groningen, he was an associate professor at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. He holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford. He specializes in political philosophy. His book, titled Incommensurability and Its Implications for Practical Reasoning, Ethics and Justice (2017), is the result of research on incommensurability of values and its implications for justice. Christopher Cowley  is an associate professor in the School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Ireland. He is the author of two books (including Moral Responsibility, 2013) and has edited three volumes (including The Philosophy of Autobiography, 2015, and Supererogation, 2015). He specializes mainly in ethics, with a side interest in the philosophy of criminal law. Simon Cushing  is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The University of Michigan–Flint. He co-edited The Philosophy of Autism (2012) with Jami L.  Anderson, and edited Heaven and Philosophy (2017). His interviews with leading philosophers can be found at https://www.cognethic.org/ philosophical-­profiles. N.  L.  Engel-Hawbecker  is a doctoral candidate at The University of Texas at Austin. Ernesto V. Garcia  is an assistant professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He works mainly on history of modern philosophy (especially Hume and Kant) and contemporary ix

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moral  and  political philosophy, and he has published on various topics including forgiveness, authenticity, and respect for persons. Ishtiyaque Haji  is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Calgary. He has research interests in ethical theory, philosophy of action, metaphysics, and philosophical psychology. He is the author of Moral Appraisability (1998), Deontic Morality and Control (2002), Moral Responsibility, Authenticity, and Education (with Stefaan Cuypers; 2008), Freedom and Value (2009), Incompatibilism’s Allure (2009), Reason’s Debt to Freedom (2012), Luck’s Mischief (2016), and The Obligation Dilemma (2019). Larry  A.  Herzberg is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, where he teaches courses on epistemology, the philosophy of emotion, and the philosophy of language (among others). Since earning his PhD in philosophy from UCLA in 2003, he has published articles focusing on issues in the philosophy of emotion and the epistemology of self-knowledge, including “Constitutivism, Belief and Emotion” (2008), “Causation, Direction, and Appraisal Theories of Emotion” (2009), “To Blend or to Compose: A Debate About Emotion Structure” (2012), “On Knowing How I Feel About That: A Process-­ Reliabilist Analysis” (2016), “Can Emotional Feelings Represent Significant Relations?” (2018), and “On Sexual Lust as an Emotion” (2019). He is  currently exploring  epistemological issues  related to  the internet. Maria  Ioannou has been an assistant professor at the University of Groningen since 2016. She holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford with a specialization in social psychology. Her research lies in the field of intergroup conflict, prejudice, and intergroup contact. Prior to her appointment at the University of Groningen, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cyprus as well as a researcher in the civil society sector conducting research on social cohesion and reconciliation. Andrea  Klonschinski  is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of  Medical Ethics and History of Medicine, Göttingen University (Germany). She works in the field of moral philosophy and philosophy of economics. Her research focuses especially on the ethics of discrimination, well-being measures, and on women in philosophy. She is the author of the book The Economics of Resource Allocation in Health Care: Cost-Utility,

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Social Value, and Fairness (2016). From 2012 until 2020, she organized the philosophical movie series Filmisches Philosophieren, in which philosophical aspects of popular movies are discussed with the audience. Michael Kühler  is a Research and Teaching Fellow at the Academy for Responsible Research, Teaching, and Innovation (ARRTI) at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, as well as “Privatdozent” (roughly equaling associate professor) at the University of Münster, Germany. He has studied philosophy, musicology, and pedagogy and got his doctoral degree in philosophy at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, in 2005, with a thesis on the intertwined problem of moral justification and motivation. In 2012, he completed his “habilitation” at the University of Münster, Germany, with a monograph on the principle “ought implies can.” His areas of expertise include ethics, metaethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of love. He has several publications on the philosophy of love. Most recently, he co-edited (together with Rachel Fedock and Raja Rosenhagen) the volume Love, Justice, and Autonomy, Routledge, 2021. Cathy Mason  is Stipendiary Lecturer in Philosophy at Wadham College, University of Oxford, supervising students in ethics, practical ethics, theory of politics, and aesthetics. Her research is focused on ethics, epistemology (especially moral epistemology), aesthetics, and the writing of Iris Murdoch (particularly at the points in her work where these topics converge). In the summer of 2019, she completed her PhD in Philosophy, titled Neglected Virtues: Love, Hope, and Humility, at Trinity College, Cambridge, under the supervision of Paulina Sliwa and Tom Dougherty. Adriana Mattos  is Lecturer in Health and Life Sciences at the University of Groningen. She holds a PhD in Medical and Pharmaceutical Sciences (2013) from the University of Groningen. Her thesis was focused on the effects of targeted delivery of interleukin-10 to the fibrotic liver. She also has experience in parasitology and tropical diseases. Edgar Phillips  is a postdoctoral researcher in the Institut Jean Nicod at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris  and an affiliate member of the Thumos research group at the University of Geneva. He works in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and ethics. He gained his PhD in Philosophy at University College London in 2018.

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Monica Roland  holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Oslo, where she was an affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature (CSMN). Her main research interests are the philosophy of love (and more generally the philosophy of emotions), normativity and the nature of reasons, rationality (and its relation to irrationality), philosophy of science, and feminism. In her dissertation What Is Love? (2016) she defends the claim that love is a moral emotion, as well as a response to reasons that justify the emotion. She currently  works at Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet) as a senior advisor. Andrew Sneddon  is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa. He studies ethics and philosophical psychology. His books include Autonomy (2013) and Like-Minded: Externalism and Moral Psychology (2011). Lotte Spreeuwenberg  is researching love, ethics, and moral psychology at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. She is writing her doctoral dissertation Against the Fat Relentless Ego: Love at the Centre of Morality, with Iris Murdoch as an overarching author. Besides publishing on love in academic journals, she spends a great deal of her time writing public philosophy, with a focus on activism. With Martha Claeys, she produces and hosts the philosophy podcast Kluwen, which aims at showing that philosophy deserves life beyond academia. Ryan  Stringer  is a crazy cat-lover who earned his PhD in Philosophy from the University of California San Diego in 2019 after completing and defending his dissertation, The Nature and Normativity of Love and Friendship. Besides the philosophy of love and friendship, he specializes in metaethics, normative ethics, and moral philosophy in general. He is currently teaching at Purdue University for the Cornerstone Program. Ryan Wittingslow  is an assistant professor at the University of Groningen, and holds a PhD in art history and philosophy  from the University of Sydney (2014). Most of his research sits at the intersection of aesthetics, philosophy of technology, and philosophy of design. He also has devastating opinions about art.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Simon Cushing

1.1   I Want to Know What Love Is Love has been a topic of interest to philosophy since at least the time of Plato’s Symposium, but with a few notable exceptions, it was unduly neglected in the twentieth century, at least by writers in the analytic tradition that predominates in the English-speaking world. However, in the past quarter century, writing on the topic has exploded. In this volume, we touch on most of the currently hot debates and also introduce some fascinating tangents. The main threads of discussion reflected in this volume are as follows: the relationship between love and morality (is it adversarial, congenial, or are they in fact co-dependent?); whether love is rational, subject to reasons for or against it, or a force that is not under our intentional control; and whether love affects the way we perceive the world or the way we value things in the world (and whether this is a good thing). More singular topics include: whether love would be affected by disputes in the literature on free will; whether we could be mistaken about being in love; whether our pets are capable of loving us back; whether a relationship of the kind shown in the movie her between a human and an artificial

S. Cushing (*) University of Michigan–Flint, Flint, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Cushing (ed.), New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72324-8_1

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intelligence could be either loving or ethical; and whether the difference between patriotism and nationalism hinges on how each instances a different kind of love (and what that says about each of those “isms”). Along the way we will see analyses of the work of philosophical greats like Immanuel Kant as well as the work of more contemporary writers, in particular Iris Murdoch, and philosophers actively engaged in the current revival, notably Harry Frankfurt, J. David Velleman, and Niko Kolodny.

1.2   (If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want to Be Right Love and morality may seem to be independent of each other, and often even at odds. Othello, having murdered his beloved Desdemona out of jealousy, says that he is “one that lov’d not wisely but too well,” implying that love is a force that can propel one to commit monstrous acts. For a more recent fictional example, think of Jaime Lannister pushing Bran Stark out of a window while muttering, “The things I do for love.” The fact that morality requires us to be impartial while love is very much partial is at the core of the apparent tension. The influential post-war British philosopher Bernard Williams is responsible for probably the most cited discussion of an illustration of the potential clash. He quotes Charles Fried’s discussion of a man confronted with the choice of only being able to save one of two drowning people, one of whom is the man’s own wife. Fried argues that the man can be morally justified in saving his wife over a stranger, but Williams bemoans even the need to give moral justification for his partiality. [T]he idea that moral principle can legitimate his preference, yielding the conclusion that in situations of this kind it is at least all right (morally permissible) to save one’s wife… provides the agent with one thought too many: it might have been hoped by some (for instance, by his wife) that his motivating thought, fully spelled out, would be the thought that it was his wife…. [T]he point is that somewhere (and if not in this case, where?) one reaches the necessity that such things as deep attachments to other persons will express themselves in the world in ways which cannot at the same time embody the impartial view, and that they also run the risk of offending against it. (Williams 1981: 18)

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As we shall see, this case and Williams’ phrase “one thought too many” have proved to be quite a touchstone in contemporary discussion. Williams provides the basis for arguing that love itself provides reasons that not only do motivate us independently of morality, but should do so, even in cases of apparent conflict. This is a theme we shall see revisited in several papers in this collection. However, many philosophers down the ages have argued that, to the contrary, love and morality are intertwined, that you cannot have one without the other. So we have two camps: one promoting love as a force independent of morality and in some senses deserving to win out over it in the battle to motivate action; the other arguing that they march in sync and should not be seen as at odds. Confusingly, both camps can cite the work of Immanuel Kant, usually held up as the greatest of the modern philosophers, and certainly among the most influential ethicists, for support for their position. On the one hand, Kant’s ethics are notoriously demanding: he argues for a system of exceptionless rules and contends that one’s action only has moral worth if one acts out of duty, prompted by one’s rational nature. This does not seem like a conception of morality that would have room for love as we typically conceive of it: for Kant, if one were to help a loved one simply because one loved them, this would not count as a moral act. However, two of contemporary philosophy’s most influential defenders of “love as a moral emotion” are explicitly influenced by Kant. The first of these is Iris Murdoch, who was a philosopher before she became known for her novels (and for being the subject of the 2001 film Iris), whose work is the main subject of two chapters in this collection. The other, whose work is cited in just about every chapter in this volume, is J. David Velleman. He writes: We have made a mistake… as soon as we accept the assumption of a conflict in spirit. Love is a moral emotion precisely in the sense that its spirit is closely akin to that of morality. (Velleman 1999: 341)

Because Velleman’s work has been so influential on the philosophy of love of the past twenty-odd years, I will take a moment to outline his view. In his initial essay, Velleman took particular issue with what he saw as an emerging orthodoxy that love was a drive. Much of love’s bad moral reputation, he argued, could be traced to Freud, who presented love as a drive that all too often was based on misperception of its object. Contemporary analytic philosophers followed Freud in presenting love as a “syndrome of motives” with an aim, primarily desires directed

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toward the beloved, typically to be with, to benefit, to please, or to be well thought of by them. Instead of this, Velleman conceives of love as a way of perceiving a loved one: A sense of wonder at the vividly perceived reality of another person is, in my view, the essence of love. (Velleman 2008: 199)

Velleman argues that love exactly parallels Kantian respect: for Kant, the ultimate directive of ethics (the Categorical Imperative) insists that we respect the personhood of others such that they must be regarded as sources of value and never used as a means to one’s own ends. Kant argues that respect for another acts as a check on one’s own tendencies to want to exploit things in the world around one. Where respect is the mandated minimum attitude toward other persons, love, claims Velleman, is an optional maximum attitude, and love arrests our tendencies toward emotional self-protection, leaving us vulnerable to the objects of our love. This vulnerability can lead us to appreciate our beloved’s features so that we may say that we love their crooked smile, but this does not mean that we love them for their crooked smile (which creates all kinds of problems for other theorists who do claim this, as we shall see), but rather we love the smile because it is “an expression or symbol or reminder” of the beloved’s value as a person. Velleman also stresses that while love is an attitude of valuing another, it is not one that compares them to others. To love comparatively is to put a price on what we value, such that it can be replaced by something of equal or greater value. But love does not rank beloveds any more than parents rank their children. Again drawing on Kant, Velleman argues that the kind of value that persons have is incomparable because it responds to their dignity, not to a price. This, he says, is the solution to the paradox that anyone equally may be loved, but the love for each is uniquely special. Love is a moral emotion, just as respect is, because it is a response to the dignity of persons. Evidence of its moral influence is that it is the means by which moral lessons are first taught to children and by which the moral sensibilities of adults can be (re)enlivened (Velleman 2008: 201). But perhaps most importantly, love is the emotion that makes us care about the good of another, makes us work to ensure their flourishing. Thus it is that we may end up desiring to help them, not because love itself is that desire, but because wanting to help them is a natural result of the vulnerability to them that itself comes from “really seeing” them (to use a phrase Velleman borrows from Murdoch).

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Another philosopher who offers a Kantian take on a phenomenon one might have thought outside of the moral sphere is Neera Kapur Badhwar, who argues that the only way to make sense of the fact that true friendship (and love) must be constant through changes in personality and feeling is to locate that friendship not in a response to any contingent, inconstant features of one’s friend or lover, but in their humanity (Badhwar 1989). Velleman’s conception of love and Badhwar’s of friendship are overtly influenced by Kant, but are they pictures that Kant himself would recognize or endorse? In Chap. 2, “Making Room for Love in Kantian Ethics,” Ernesto Garcia explores this question. First, Garcia points out that Kant actually discusses love in writings other than the ethical works that influence the two contemporary thinkers. Kant makes a distinction between moral and non-moral (or natural) love, which he calls love as a passion. While both dispose us to help others, they can be distinguished both by what aspects of our nature motivate them (rational or “sensible”) and whether or not each can be morally required of us (the former can, because it is a moral obligation, while the latter cannot, because it is a contingent feeling, and thus not under our voluntary control). If moral love sounds strange, Kant argues that in fact it is the only way to understand the passages of the New Testament that command us to love our neighbors and enemies, for non-moral love cannot be commanded. Kant also makes a parallel distinction between types of friendship, except that moral friendship also incorporates moral love. Now, with this distinction in Kant, it appears that he has acknowledged that there is a legitimate form of love that is non-moral, and that perhaps his moral love is a specialized kind, a religious ideal. Has Velleman, in arguing that love of the kind that we might feel for our children and our partners is fundamentally a moral attitude, conflated the two loves? A problem for Kantian moral love is that it must be truly universal: we are required, after all, to love even our enemies. The love that Velleman and Badhwar want to defend, however, is the actual, partial (in the sense of “not impartial,” rather than “incomplete”) love we feel for a select few individuals. How can Velleman and Badhwar explain this partiality on our parts? Badhwar argues that it is not the humanity that is found within every person that our friendship responds to but rather the empirical personhood of concrete historical individuals. Velleman argues that the love he is defending is optional (unlike the minimum required attitude of respect), and its reasons can be particular. But what it is is a disarming of emotional defenses in response to the incomparable and non-instrumental

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value of another human being. Garcia concludes that, on the one hand, the modern Kantians’ accounts of love are improvements on Kant’s own “moral love,” because we find the notion of loving someone out of duty counterintuitive, and the modern Kantians place the focus of love in the right place, that is, on the people who are the objects of our love and friendship. However, Garcia argues that what Kant gets right is in separating love out into kinds, at least one of which is non-moral. Tackling Velleman’s account in particular, Garcia argues that it is open to a strong and a weak reading. The weak reading is trivially true (love involves making oneself emotionally vulnerable to another who is a being worthy of moral respect) but does not show that love is moral. The strong reading, on the other hand, which requires that we love someone because of our knowledge of them as  a moral agent, is neither sufficient for love (it is equally true of appealing for help, mercy, or friendship) nor necessary (one can love another romantically without viewing them as a moral agent). Garcia concludes by agreeing with Berit Brogaard that there is not a single kind of love, and while Velleman-style moral love might indeed be one kind of love, there are others, and others of value.

1.3   The Look of Love Before Velleman, and in fact influencing his argument for love as a moral emotion, was the British philosopher-turned-novelist, Iris Murdoch, whose work is undergoing something of a revival. Cathy Mason’s chapter presents both an argument in support of her account and a critical evaluation of writers who, while inspired by Murdoch, have abandoned what Mason takes to be core parts of Murdoch’s view. A primary motivation for Murdoch’s writing was that the dominant behaviorist approach of mid-­ twentieth-­century philosophy ignored a vital kind of moral activity that was purely internal. Prior to any action that can be deemed of moral worth, we must, argued Murdoch, practice attention, a fundamentally moral attitude to the world that is a kind of love. This attitude has an epistemic aspect: only through viewing the world with love can one achieve a true understanding of reality, and it is this process of attending to the world in a loving way that is itself a moral activity. In a key example, Murdoch describes how a mother-in-law (M) with an initial dislike of her son’s wife (D) manages to revise her view after “looking again.” In so doing, not only does she arrive at a truer picture of reality, she herself is improved by the process. While contemporary writers defending love as a

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moral attitude have been influenced by Murdoch, Mason argues that they do not do full justice to important elements of her view. For example, Velleman’s view of love as an appreciation of the moral personhood of another that requires “really seeing” one’s beloved departs from Murdoch’s approach both because Murdoch, unlike Velleman, insists that love is morally necessary, and not merely optional, and because, for her, it is the concrete particularity of an individual that love focuses on, not the rational will that every person instantiates equally, as in Velleman’s account. Mason also considers Mark Hopwood’s sympathetic exegetical work on Murdoch (Hopwood 2014, 2017) and finds that while it acknowledges Murdoch’s view of the particularity of the subject of love and describes an epistemic role for love, that role is not the one Murdoch intended. Hopwood says love reveals normative demands on the lover, but, Mason contends, Murdoch insists that love’s role is primarily to reveal facts about the person being loved. Furthermore, the facts revealed by the loving gaze are both objectively real and unable to be captured in the supposedly value-neutral language of science. Murdoch, argues Mason, views love as a character trait, as, in fact, a virtue, alongside those studied by the ancient Greeks, including courage and wisdom, and like those character features, love is a reliable sensitivity to real features of the world. When one gazes on another with love, as M did with D, the good qualities that one’s beloved genuinely possesses (and not qualities that one projects on them because of one’s loving gaze, as an anti-realist might contend) are revealed. As might be unsurprising, Murdoch’s view of love has appeared quixotic to some critics. Does it really map on to love as we normally understand it? Against the criticism that Murdoch’s epistemic conception of love rules out the affective component that is stressed in all love songs, for example, Mason points out, first, that there are respectable theories of emotion that present all emotions as having an epistemic component; second, that our common-sense conception of love includes the thesis that true love requires truly knowing one’s beloved; and third, that love cannot be reduced to an affective state alone, because such states are necessarily intermittent, whereas a love can last a lifetime. Against the criticism that Murdoch’s view cannot account for the selectivity of love—a criticism leveled at Velleman’s view, as we saw, and potentially worse for Murdoch, who rejects the idea that love is optional—Mason distinguishes between love and loving attention. Whereas the latter might be what is commanded, it is necessary but not sufficient for the variety of loves that there are, and what might make particular loves (for one’s children, for a

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romantic partner) selective or unique might be a function of how one’s relationship or the behavior of one’s beloved facilitates the loving attention. Finally, there is the criticism that Murdoch’s view seems to presume that everyone is a suitable subject for loving attention. But we are familiar with loves that we think are profoundly mistaken, or individuals who make unsuitable subjects for loving attention, perhaps because they are irredeemably wicked. But, first, a truly loving attention, because it is attuned to reality, would reveal an absence of good just as much as its presence. And second, the idea that loving attention is commanded for all is not peculiar to Murdoch: its most famous proponent is the Jesus of the Gospels.

1.4   Love Me Do The philosopher Sally Haslanger, in her writing on gender, coined the term “ameliorative inquiry” for an approach to defining a concept that aims not solely at descriptive accuracy about the way people currently use it, but at producing a possibly revisionist, improved version, with the aim of making the society that employs the concept a better place. In Chap. 4, “‘Love’ as a Practice: Looking at Real People,” Lotte Spreeuwenberg suggests that we should do the same for the concept of love. As we have seen, both Velleman and Iris Murdoch have offered influential moralized accounts of love, and Spreeuwenberg’s first task is to evaluate whether either suits the ameliorative inquiry she has in mind. Tackling Velleman’s first: while she applauds his commitment to “really seeing” one’s beloved, she, in common with many of Velleman’s critics, finds unsatisfactory both his view of the subject of the loving gaze as the Kantian self, and his solution to the selectivity of love (in contrast to the universality of the requirement of respect) in the claim that it is a contingent fact that we respond with love to certain empirical selves and not to others. The problem with this, points out Spreeuwenberg, is that it fails to account for the personal character of love, both because the bare Kantian self is impersonal, but also because it is a mystery what features of an individual may trigger us to respond to their Kantian self rather than another’s. Spreeuwenberg thus turns to the view of an author who attempts to fix this flaw while preserving what is valuable in a Velleman-like approach: Pilar Lopez-Cantero. She suggests that the subject of the loving gaze is not the bare Kantian self but its product, which is a narrative. This is indeed unique to each person, thereby better accounting for the personal

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character of love, with “narrative fit” between lover and beloved explaining when and why love blossoms. However, Spreeuwenberg finds the views of both Lopez-Cantero and Velleman to be too passive, certainly for her ameliorative inquiry, and uses the example of Dante and his “muse” Beatrice (whom he barely exchanged two words with, but fixated on) to illustrate why. While Dante certainly believes he loves Beatrice, and is caused to do so by some feature he perceives in her, he is not perceiving her as she truly is, but as some ideal that he projects on to her. Love should be, in the words of bell hooks, a verb, that is, active, a process, as Adrienne Rich puts it, “of refining the truths [lovers] tell each other.” Viewing it this way shifts the focus from the lover alone to an interactive partnership, and Iris Murdoch’s writings on love provide a framework for this active approach. Murdoch’s “M and D” case, described earlier, is an illustration of love as truly attending to the target of one’s gaze to see her in her (changing) reality. Spreeuwenberg considers suggestions by psychologists like Lisa Bortolotti that projecting fantasies on to one’s partner might have positive effects for the lover or the relationship, but concludes that fantasies are no part of the ameliorative project, especially if we widen its scope to the political sphere and call on love to break down barriers between oppressors and oppressed. Spreeuwenberg ends by cautioning that we should not assume that we can capture the full reality of our beloved, or even that this is the goal, agreeing with Carla Bagnoli that understanding another has a possibly invasive aspect. But love as attending to others is the love that will make us and our society a better place, and therefore the best reconstruction of the concept for a project of making love a force for good.

1.5   Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that love is something over which we have no control: we fall in love, sometimes against our better judgment and to our own dismay. On this view, love is, in the words of the title of a paper by Nick Zangwill, “gloriously amoral and arational” (Zangwill 2013). However, I say “almost,” because in Chap. 5, “Love, Choice, and Taking Responsibility,” Christopher Cowley argues for an important role for choice in love, in the form of a lover taking responsibility for meeting the prospective needs of their beloved. Thus, Cowley joins the previous authors in finding a moral core in love. Cowley takes up Susan Wolf’s suggestion that there is a virtue in a willingness to take

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responsibility for what one has yet to do (prospective responsibility, rather than the more usually discussed retroactive kind) and locates just such a virtue in the commitments of an ongoing loving relationship between adults. Using the marriage vow as a case study, Cowley argues that it involves not just responsibility for one’s spouse and the needs of the person they will become, but also responsibility for becoming the kind of person who will stay committed, both to the love and to the meeting of needs. Cowley responds to challenges to this analysis of love both from existentialists, who could argue that it involves an abandonment of radical freedom and a bad faith essentialization of both parties, and also from a famous case described by Michael Stocker, where a person confined to a hospital is dismayed to find that the person he had considered a friend was motivated solely by moral duty to visit him (Stocker 1976). Cowley suggests that we can distinguish between duty and responsibility, where the problem with the former is that it is impersonal, while the latter comprises a response to the particular friend and their needs. In this respect, Cowley’s view resembles Harry Frankfurt’s depiction of love as a configuration of the will that presents the lover with felt necessities that they experience just like the demands of conscience. However, Cowley finds Frankfurt’s view too unilateral, as it focuses entirely on the experiences of the lover, allowing for such phenomena as unrequited love or even love of non-­ persons. Cowley contends that the love he wants to defend is necessarily instantiated in the relationship between two lovers, both of them moral agents. That love, claims Cowley, is depicted beautifully in The Little Prince, where those who have chosen each other become unique in the whole world to each other. In some respects, Cowley’s view solves the problem of specificity (that we saw plagued Velleman’s view, in the eyes of his critics) in a similar way to Niko Kolodny’s view (Kolodny 2003), but adds to it the normative principle that love requires of us that we maintain and live up to the demands of that relationship.

1.6   Love Is a Battlefield Just how seriously should we take the comparison between love and war at work in both Ecclesiastes and the well-known proverb? Andrew Sneddon, in Chap. 6, “Not All’s Fair in Love and War: Toward Just Love Theory,” suggests that, just as “Just War” theory subverts that proverb in the case of war, we should construct a “Just Love” theory to provide an ethical roadmap for loving relationships. Just War theory is typically divided into

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three parts: jus ad bellum, which concerns the grounds for going to war; jus in bello, which lays out the restrictions on what is acceptable while war is waged; and jus post bellum, covering the aftermath. Sneddon focuses on analogs of the first two for the conducting of loving relationships. But before embarking on either, he first contends with the challenge faced by any attempt to lay out the ethics of war: that the very idea is naïve. Self-­ styled “realists” reject the notion that war is an appropriate (or even possible) subject of a code of ethics. A parallel challenge to Just Love theory takes Zangwill’s stance on the amorality of love. However, even were that the case, Sneddon contends that loving relationships, and the actions taken in their context, are very much intentional, and thus subject to moral evaluation. Furthermore, Sneddon argues that if we assume the following things about love (he focusses strictly on the romantic kind): that it is other-directed, tied up with other emotions, and love affects other emotions holistically, so that emotions felt as part of a loving relationship are experienced as part of that relationship, this reveals the need for an ethical rulebook, given how profoundly one’s actions affect the other party in a loving relationship. The love analog of jus ad bellum Sneddon calls jus ad amantes necessitudo. Where war requires a just cause, love requires a just target, someone who is capable of participating in a loving relationship and capable of consenting to the costs of that relationship. The costs may depend on the goals of the relationship, which must also be just. These goals can be internal to the relationship, such as being partners, or external (in the sense that they could possibly be secured without such a relationship), like having sex, children, or company. Other criteria of jus ad amantes necessitudo include “necessity” (a loving relationship is necessary to achieving the goals, at least, when they are internal), “proportionality” (of the relationship to the strengths of one’s sentiments and importance of the goals—interestingly Sneddon allows that if one is infatuated with a celebrity, seeking a relationship with them is not ruled out by this criterion, although very likely by others), and “chance of success” (the analog of chance of victory in war). One tentative conclusion Sneddon draws is that it will be very difficult for external goals to justify a relationship according to these criteria—so much for arranged marriages. What about rules for behavior within loving relationships? Jus in amantes necessitudo governs actions motivated by love in a relationship already established, and, argues Sneddon, must be weighed against other priorities in a life well-lived. Displays of affection that bother others (one thinks

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of the Seinfeld episode (“The Soup Nazi”) where Jerry and his girlfriend-­ of-­the-episode (played by Alexandra Wentworth) refer to each other as “schmoopy”) are out, and Sneddon recalls bitterly having to cover for a co-worker at a fast food job because she was trying to reconcile with her boyfriend. How useful is this sketch? Can real lovers actually follow such guidelines, or is the realist right to scoff? You be the judge, dear reader.

1.7   Is This Love? It is impossible to doubt whether or not one is in pain. But it does not seem to be impossible to doubt whether or not one is in love. In Chap. 7, “Doubting Love,” inspired by Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair, Larry A. Herzberg analyzes the nature of love that would make this doubt possible, and what are the limits of doubt and certainty in matters of the heart. Herzberg draws inspiration from R.J. Sternberg’s influential “triangular theory” of love that divides love into distinct components of emotion, passion, and commitment. He argues that doubt is possible to varying degrees about each of these components. Least doubt is possible about our passionate feelings (they are most similar to feelings like pain, whose presence or absence is indubitable), most doubt is possible about our emotions, and somewhere in between lies our certainty about the nature or existence of our commitments. Herzberg agrees with Christopher Cowley on the importance of commitment to love and points out that there has to be a volitional element to love to explain both the defensiveness and guilt about the wrong answer to the question “do you love me?” as well as feelings of betrayal against a lover whose love goes away. Herzberg also argues that one may doubt one’s emotions, both because one may be unsure of their objects, and because love can be comprised of a cluster of other emotions, each of which may be hard to distinguish from other, closely related emotions which are not indicative of love. However, Herzberg concludes that doubt is not an essential corollary of love and that there are many people whose circumstances and history ensure that they can be sure of their love.

1.8   Can’t Help Falling in Love The view that love is something that happens to us irrespective of our plans and choices has fared poorly so far, despite its intuitive appeal, and in Chap. 8, “Love and Free Agency,” Ishtiyaque Haji aims to deliver another

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wounding blow against it. Haji argues that love is “fragile,” in the sense that the value or even existence of love is conditional on the results of age-­ old philosophical debates about free will. To put this in context, since at least the time of the ancient Greeks, arguments have been considered that purport to threaten our usual conviction that we are free agents, able to control our own destinies, and, as a corollary, appropriately subject to assessments of responsibility such as praise and blame. That is, the reason why we standardly think it is legitimate to hold people accountable for their wrongdoings (or praiseworthy for their virtuous acts) is because we think those actions were up to them, under their control, not merely things that happened to them. However, “responsibility skeptics” produce arguments to show that, really, our actions are not up to us, and our belief that they are is based on an illusion. Extreme responsibility skeptics argue that none of our actions are ever up to us, which seems very radical to the uninitiated, but one can work gradually toward that conclusion by less extreme steps. One such step is to argue for “responsibility historicism,” which is the view that whether or not somebody is capable of the kinds of action that merit assessments of responsibility depends on factors outside of the mind and body of that individual (which is why the view is also called “externalism”). One major argument for externalism involves thought experiments depicting fiendish psychological manipulation of individuals, such as Alfred Mele’s example “One Bad Day” (Mele 2019: 20–21) quoted by Haji. In this case, the saintly Sally is manipulated to have just the same evil psychological makeup as the merciless murderer Chuck, so that Sally intentionally plots and executes a hapless victim over the course of the titular day, only to have her saintly psychology reinstated by the same twisted psychological manipulators during the night that follows. Mele contends that we should all agree that Sally should not be held responsible for her murder, but Chuck should for his, even though both are the same from an internalist perspective. Thus, whether or not one should be held responsible for an action depends on the history of how the psychology that produced that action was acquired (hence “historicism”). Canvassing various recent philosophical accounts of love (some of which should be very familiar to us by now), Haji contends that all of them contain necessary psychological elements that are open to the same kind of arguments for externalism as the responsibility-­undergirding ones in “One Bad Day.” To make the point, Haji describes “One Lovely Day,” where whatever psychological states manifest Romeo’s love for Juliet are implanted in Romello for a day.

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During that day, asks Haji, “does Romello indeed love Juliet?” Haji contends that if we are moved by the externalist arguments supported by “One Bad Day,” then we should conclude that Romello does not, and that love, like responsibility, depends not just on the presence of certain psychological states, but on how they have been acquired. (Lest one wonder about the relevance of paranoid science-fiction cases involving devious covert mind-manipulators, once historicism is established, the next step is to argue that natural forces like genetics and environment, the kinds of things that really do shape our psychological makeups, can have similar responsibility/love undermining effects.) However, even if one is not convinced by this to become an externalist, Haji maintains that even from an internalist/anti-historicist standpoint, “One Lovely Day” reveals three results. First, even if Romello really does love Juliet during his manipulated day, that love is of a lesser value—is forced or ersatz. Second, to be an instance of loving behavior, an action or state has to issue from love. This parallels the distinction, insisted on by Kant, among others, between praiseworthy virtuous action from duty, and non-praiseworthy, only apparently virtuous action in accordance with duty. That is, just as one’s helping somebody is not meritorious if one does it solely for an expected reward, so one’s showing affection to another is only praiseworthy from love’s standpoint if it is motivated by love, and not by duty or other considerations. Haji develops this thought in a section where he expands the suggested analogs between behavior that is morally responsible and that is motivated by love, arguing that any view of love that posits that “emotions may be construed as constituting relationships of love and friendship” supports this parallel. Haji goes on to propose the notion of normative standards (he suggests the terms “commendability” and “censurability”) from love’s standpoint. The third result Haji adduces from “One Lovely Day” is that love is fragile in the sense introduced at the start, that it has “freedom or autonomy presuppositions.” Finally, Haji considers an attempt by noted free-will skeptic Derk Pereboom to save love from just the kind of externalist considerations that he (and Haji) use against responsibility. Pereboom is, in effect, a “love optimist,” because he believes that while there may be emotions, like remorse and guilt, that are both associated with relationships and “fragile” to externalist considerations, they may easily be substituted by non-fragile alternatives, like sorrow and regret. Against this attempt, Haji contends that these suggested analogs are equally fragile. If Seth harms you, suggests Haji, and then expresses sorrow, you would not accept that sorrow as genuine if you

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found that it was (once again) produced in him solely by psychological manipulation. Thus Haji concludes that whether or not we are free agents impacts not just whether or not we are morally responsible, but also whether or not we are capable of love, something philosophers of religion have long insisted on in offering justifications for God granting us free will, despite the fact that (they claim) it is responsible for all the evil and suffering in the world.

1.9   Love Me for a Reason A theme running through the chapters we have just discussed has been the dispute over the extent to which love can be seen as a “gloriously arational” force that overtakes us and carries us along in a way that is beyond our control (and is thus something we cannot be held accountable for) or whether or not our love and what issues from it is a matter of rational appraisal. The front on which this dispute is most overtly fought in contemporary analytic philosophy is in the dispute over the relationship (or not) between love and reasons. The most influential philosopher advocating a “No Reason” view of love (which, to be clear, means that no reasons can be given for why we love, although, as we shall see, he argues that love itself is the ground of reasons for a great many things) is Harry Frankfurt. His writing provided the motivation for many critics who have themselves become influential, most notably Velleman and Niko Kolodny. Such critics point out that love does not seem like bodily functions such as sweating and digestion, things that are genuinely not the products of our decisions. And it does seem like, if asked “why do you love x?” the kind of answer expected is not simply “because certain chemicals were released in my brain” but rather one involving reasons like “x is so dreamy!” or “x is my child!” or even, if one believes Velleman, “x is a Kantian moral agent.” The love one feels, in short, can be justified. Or so goes the Reason View of love. There are several variants, of course, but the most intuitive has it that when x loves y it is because of a feature or set of features of y. On the one hand, this seems right: x’s love of y should be explained by something about y. If the reason for x loving y had nothing to do with y, then y would no doubt be insulted (“I love you because of a compulsion I have to love everybody”). And, of course, we saw that a challenge faced by Velleman’s view was that he picked a feature that was too general (at least for his critics—as Kolodny put it, “personal ads do not read: ‘Bare Kantian person seeks same’”

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(Kolodny 2003: 174)), but on the other hand, if one does pick particular features of the beloved, then that also seems objectionable. Philosophers writing on this topic are fond of citing W.B. Yeats’ “For Ann Gregory,” wherein a girl with gorgeous “honey-colored” hair yearns that young men “May love me for myself alone/And not my yellow hair.” This is the core of the No Reason view’s attack on the Reason view, but No Reasoners have more weapons in their arsenal. In Chap. 9, “Sentimental Reasons,” Edgar Phillips, citing Setiya (2014), lists four puzzles that point to apparently counterintuitive implications of a Reason view. First, universality: if Ennis’ love for Jack is based on good reasons, shouldn’t every rational agent, exposed to the same reasons, also love Jack? Second, promiscuity: if Catherine loves Jules for a certain reason (say, the insouciant way he smokes his Gauloises), then if Jim embodies the same feature, shouldn’t Catherine also love him? Third, trading up: suppose Kamariah loves Thomas for his long curly hair. If someone with an even more impressive mane shows up, it implies that she should abandon Thomas for the preferably coiffed alternative. Finally, inconstancy: philosophers who discuss this problem are wont to cite Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 wherein he writes “Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds.” When Billy Bragg says, “And then one day it happened/She cut her hair and I stopped loving her” (“Walk Away Renee (Version)”), it is not meant to reflect well on the maturity of the authorial voice, but it seems to follow from the Reason View that should you lose the features that were the basis for my love for you, then my love will cease. Our two authors on this topic, Phillips and N.L.  Engel-Hawbecker, respond to puzzles such as these by digging deeper into the nature of reasons themselves. Phillips points out that there are actually three different kinds of roles that reasons can play. Reasons can explain behavior by pointing to a cause, whether or not that cause was known to the actor. Reasons can also be what a person has in mind when acting intentionally (“motivating” or “personal” reasons). Finally, reasons can justify one’s behavior. It may be, posits Phillips, that a particular Reasons View of love envisages the kind of reason in question to play one of the roles, but not the other. For example, the fact that I was hungry is a perfectly good explanation of why I bought a loaf of bread. Raising the objection “but that doesn’t explain why you bought that loaf of bread!” seems beside the point. However, he concludes that for many of the proponents of Reason Views, the reasons are meant to play more than one of these roles. So next he suggests that perhaps the problem is that we are mischaracterizing love by

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comparing it with reason-responsive dispositions like intention or belief. While it is true that a belief I have (say, that injecting bleach will cure Covid-19) requires justification, and should alter if the circumstances it concerns change or new information comes to light, this does not necessarily apply to love. Perhaps, suggests Phillips, love is a sentiment, where such things, like one’s character, are deep, long-lasting, developed gradually over time, and not formed by choice. This is not to say, however, that Phillips is defending a pure No Reasons view: reasons are too important to interpersonal affairs to be abandoned entirely, and once again, love is not like digestion. However, the kinds of reason one gives may not be profitably judged by the kinds of reason one should give to justify one’s beliefs or intentions. In Chap. 10, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice? Enticing Reasons to Love,” Engel-­ Hawbecker takes a different tack. He frames the No Reasons view’s challenge as the assertion that the following two claims cannot be held simultaneously: Requiring Reasons (reasons can require people to do what they favor) and Love’s Prerogative (there is nothing that can require us to love anyone). It is because of the former that we are presented with puzzles like promiscuity and trading up: if my love for x is explained by reason r, and reason r applies also, or more so, to y, then I am required to love y as well or instead. And it is because of the latter that we reject this conclusion. The problem is not with Love’s Prerogative, but perhaps we can reject Requiring Reasons without rejecting the idea that love is for a reason. One attempt at this approach suggests that the reasons for love are “warranting” reasons: reasons that, while they permit an option for which they provide a reason, as do normal reasons, do not forbid its absence. If this were the case then, for example, we avoid promiscuity because, while one is permitted to love every bearer of the feature that is the reason for love in one case, one is not required consistently to love each one. However, Engel-Hawbecker finds two problems with this thesis. The first is that, lacking an argument that all reasons for love are like this, it appears ad hoc. But second, if it is the case that love needs reasons before it is permitted, then something must be forbidding it otherwise. But one can hope to be loved even if one admits that one lacks lovable features without this hope being perverse, implying that there is nothing that forbids love even without features that might serve as reasons for it. So if there are reasons for love that are not requiring, they are not warranting reasons, says Engel-Hawbecker. Instead, we should notice that reasons typically have two kinds of properties. When they require or forbid

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something (as my belief that a number is odd requires my belief that it cannot be divided into two equal integers), they are showing their deontic properties. But they also have evaluative properties, as when they make “an option attractive rather than demanded, required, or right,” in the words of Jonathan Dancy (2004: 91), who first asserted the possible existence of reasons which have only evaluative properties, which he dubbed “enticing reasons.” Engel-Hawbecker suggests that the reasons for love could be just such kinds of reasons, and if so, that means we can abandon Requiring Reasons and keep Love’s Prerogative, without being forced to adopt a No Reasons view. Puzzles like promiscuity can be avoided: while my love for x is justified by a particular set of properties they instantiated, I am not thereby required also to love y because they also instantiate those properties. And indeed, while reasons for love are, in his view, enticing, Engel-­Hawbecker insists that that does not mean that reasons of love, which may include duties to our current lover (x), cannot be requiring, and may preempt being drawn away by a similarly featured other.

1.10   Drowning in the Sea of Love In chapter 11, “Love, Motivation, and Reasons: The Case of the Drowning Wife,” Monica Roland takes up the discussion of such reasons of love, the kind of reasons that Harry Frankfurt does endorse. I have already had cause to mention Bernard Williams’ discussion of Charles Fried’s “case of the drowning wife” (and his contention that Fried gives the husband “one thought too many” in deliberating about preferring his wife over another who is also drowning), and this case is much-discussed in the contemporary literature on love. Roland uses this case as a touchstone to discuss the nature of the reasons love offers for benevolent acts toward others and their relationship with moral reasons. She argues that Frankfurt, Velleman, and Kolodny each get something right about the case and something wrong. What Frankfurt gets right is that it is not the bare spousal relationship that provides reasons for partial treatment, and further that the husband does not need to reflect in the heat of the moment to be motivated to help his beloved. What Frankfurt gets wrong, in Roland’s view, is that loving relationships can be normatively significant, and, furthermore, valuation of those relationships by the lovers can (partially) constitute the love they have for each other. What Velleman gets right (and Frankfurt denies— although Roland argues that he is undermined in this denial by his insistence that love is a disinterested concern) is that love is a moral emotion,

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necessarily involving the moral attitude of respect, and furthermore that the reason for the husband’s partiality is their relationship. But Velleman is wrong to say that the relationship plays no part in their love. Both Frankfurt’s and Velleman’s accounts fail to provide an adequate account of love’s selectivity—why one has reason to love only one’s lover and not a qualitatively identical doppelganger. Kolodny’s solution to this problem is that one is only in a relationship with the original, not their clone: it is not the intrinsic properties of one’s beloved that explain the selectivity of love, but the relational ones. Roland also agrees with Kolodny’s insistence that love is deemed by the lover to be rendered appropriate by the relationship (loving behavior by a stranger is inappropriate and disconcerting). But she believes that he is wrong to omit lovers’ mutual appreciation of both intrinsic and relational properties as partly constitutive of the relationship. Roland ends up endorsing a “dual account” of love. Velleman’s moralized valuation of personhood provides one element, but is too general to suffice alone and must be complemented by a valuation of particulars, including the relational properties one’s beloved bears toward oneself. This results in the husband having not one but two reasons to rescue his wife. But, to avoid a Williamsesque charge that this gives the husband two thoughts too many, Roland suggests that neither need be consciously formulated at the time of action: “awareness of the inherent value of his wife and the special relationship he has with her are built in to the very fabric of the husband’s dispositions and thus implicit to his motivating thought.”

1.11   The Love Cats Up to this point we have only considered love as something that happens between (two) human individuals. However, many of us genuinely feel that we love our pets, while at the same time acknowledging that they lack many of the capacities that feature in several of the theories we have canvassed so far. (I have no doubt my cats do not respect me in the way Velleman means, and possibly in any way.) In Chap. 12, “Can Our Beloved Pets Love Us Back?” Ryan Stringer investigates whether there is any possibility that the behavior we take as affection in the non-human animals (NHAs) in our lives could be indicative of something deserving to be called love. It turns out that there are a number of books and articles written by scientists that defend the claim that, indeed, some NHAs are capable of love, and do love the humans in their lives. While Stringer professes

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himself keen to have this be true, particularly of the cats with whom he is in an otherwise mildly abusive (on their part) relationship, as a philosopher he feels he cannot take the scientists’ purported evidence as sufficient without challenge. Against Gregory Burns’ (2013) claim that dogs’ empathy for us is sufficient to demonstrate their love for us, Stringer points out that one can feel empathy for someone whom one hates, and it might even help in the task of making them suffer. Against Carl Safina’s claim (Dreifus 2019) that dogs’ desire to be near us for no other reason than to be near us evinces their love, Stringer points out both that stalkers can have this, and that it is in theory possible to have that desire isolated from any love for the target of that desire. Finally, Stringer assesses several different purported pieces of evidence for canine love in Clive Wynne’s (2019) Dog Is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You. That dogs have the capacity to form affectionate relationships with us does not suffice, because such things come in a wide spectrum, only some of which are loving relationships. That dogs exhibit hyper-social behavior fails because there are conditions that some humans have, including Williams-Beuren Syndrome, which are similar but not taken as proof of love. Wynne fares better in Stringer’s estimation by stressing that dogs show distress at being separated from their humans, find it rewarding to be near them, and apparently care about them to the point of trying to help them when in distress. Of these, evidence of attachment is deemed too self-interested to count, but Stringer takes the caring as the best potential ground for an attribution of a capacity to love. So what does love consist in, if not these scientists’ criteria? Stringer postulates that, whatever else comprises love, it must have at least the following three essential components: a disposition to feel affection (which is more than the simple presence of affection, because love is more persistent than such a potentially fleeting and necessarily intermittent feeling), a non-instrumental concern for the welfare of one’s beloved, to the extent of prioritizing the promotion of their welfare, and the assessment of one’s beloved as so special as to be irreplaceable. Failure to capture all three of these key components dooms the initially promising philosophical accounts of Thomas Hurka (an attitudinal-dispositional theory) and of Andrew Franklin-Hall and Agnieszka Jaworska (solely dispositional), but these are potentially captured by Sam Shpall’s (2018) tripartite theory of love. Shpall analyzes meaningful love as a devotion to an object that is liked, which partly consists in special concern for that object’s good, which partly consists in emotional vulnerability to that good and what affects it.

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Stringer suggests that if the notion of devotion is expanded to include the idea that the object of one’s devotion is irreplaceable, then this view captures his requirements. However, does it allow that NHAs can love the humans that love them? Stringer concludes that if we allow that something that does not quite rise to Shpall’s standard of meaningful love is still love, then dogs are plausible candidates for a capacity to love. He is forced to conclude, however, that cats fail to meet the standards of emotional vulnerability to our welfare and benevolent desire for our happiness. In a coda, however, he suggests that the relationship we can have with cats is still valuable and love-like, and this is no small thing.

1.12   Computer Love So much for animals loving us—what about things that are apparently inanimate? The 2013 Spike Jonze film her depicts a love story between a human and an artificially intelligent operating system. Assuming such a thing were possible, would it be desirable? Would the “love” that resulted be of any value? In Chap. 13, “Romantic Love Between Humans and AIs: A Feminist Ethical Critique,” Andrea Klonschinski and Michael Kühler argue that there are important reasons to doubt that it would. The first problem with the kind of relationship depicted in the film is that the “relationship” reinforces pernicious gender stereotypes. “Samantha” is created to meet every need that Theodore might have. However, lest it be said that this can be avoided by making AIs male, besides the fact that the male ones can also reinforce stereotypes (particularly if they’re built into things like your GPS and thus telling you what to do), the second problem rears its head: because AIs lack autonomy, the relationship is of necessity asymmetrical. This is true no matter what philosophical model of love you favor; the authors consider models whereby love is construed as an attitude instantiated in the lover, as in Harry Frankfurt’s love-as-caring model, love is construed intersubjectively, as in Angelika Krebs’ model of love as interpersonal sharing, or love is construed as a union, where the participants form a “we-identity,” as postulated by Mark Fisher, and Roberts Nozick, and Solomon. In no case can the relationship between humans and AIs meet the requirement of a love between equals, and thus, if it counts as love at all, it is only a degenerate form, not worth pursuing. Moreover, these problems cannot be solved simply by better programming: giving the AIs a personality would not solve the power imbalance. The user would still be able to adjust that personality in the “settings,” the

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better to suit their preferences. And giving the AI actual moral autonomy is either impossible (depending on your metaphysics) or potentially catastrophic. As Klonschinski and Kühler wryly note, it would not be financially advantageous to make a product that could reject its user, not to mention the Terminator/Robopocalypse/Ex Machina apocalyptic possibilities. Finally, lest the problem of unequal relationships with AIs be dismissed as ethically trivial, given that they are not persons, Klonschinski and Kühler remind us of the deleterious effects on our relationships with persons, and on our moral characters, particularly if the gender imbalances produce more sexists. They cite Kant’s distinction: we may not fail in our duties to AIs, but we may very well fail with regard to them. Thus, Klonschinski and Kühler’s piece draws a nice contrast with Stringer’s: where he argues that our relationships with our pets can be enriching, our relationships with artificial non-persons are potential minefields.

1.13   Thin Line Between Love and Hate If there is any entity for which love is professed as much as love for another human, it is one’s country. However, it is a love that is not always looked on as a good thing. Erich Fromm’s sentiment is not uncommon: Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. ‘Patriotism’ is its cult…Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship. (Fromm 1955: 58)

However, in Chap. 14, “Patriotism and Nationalism as Two Distinct Ways of Loving One’s Country,” authors Maria Ioannou, Martijn Boot, Ryan Wittingslow, and Adriana Mattos (who themselves represent four different nationalities) argue that not only can a principled distinction be made between nationalism and patriotism, but that, while they are both instances of love for one’s country, they are distinct kinds of love: only the former is usually pernicious, and the latter does not necessarily prove a gateway to it. Patriotism, which they define as love for one’s country along with a sense of personal identification with it and concern for its well-­being, is likened to the love a child has for their parent. Nationalism, they allow, is a more-contested term, but settle on the definition of nationalism used to refer to European nationalism from the late nineteenth to mid-­twentieth centuries. The difference between the two is that, while both feature

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in-group love, only nationalism features out-group derogation, an observation that they back up citing both sociological literature and the results of psychological experimentation. The love involved in nationalism has this feature, they argue, because it is more akin to passionate love, which carries with it both the refusal to acknowledge the flaws in the beloved (which leads to jingoistic distorted evaluation of one’s own country above others) and the possibility of loss and attendant desperation. Nationalists are in love with a particular version of their country, one associated with their particular ethnic or cultural group, and one that is easily threatened, in a way that provokes the worst excesses that we see in nationalism. The authors’ diverse disciplinary background makes this article stand out in how it draws on a particularly wide ranging variety of literatures, psychological and sociological, along with literature and philosophy, to make a compelling case for their distinctions. This is only fitting given how love itself is the subject of so many disciplines, so it is refreshing to see a case be made that empirical studies (like a study involving inhaling oxytocin prior to running trolley-problem cases with in-group versus out-­group potential victims) can elucidate our theoretical conclusions. If they are correct, their analysis helps to explain what kind of national crises are most likely to provoke nationalist violence, but also to rescue patriotism from the disrepute to which writers like Fromm have consigned it.

1.14   References Badhwar, Neera Kapur. 1989. Friends as Ends in Themselves. In Eros, Agape and Philia: Readings in the Philosophy of Love, ed. Alan Soble, 165–188. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House. Burns, Gregory. 2013. How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Dancy, Jonathan. 2004. Enticing Reasons. In Reason and Value: Themes from Joseph Raz, ed. R.  Jay Wallace, Philip Pettit, Samuel Scheffler, and Michael Smith, 91–118. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dreifus, Claudia. 2019. Carl Safina Is Certain Your Dog Loves You. The New York Times. Fisher, Mark. 1990. Personal Love. London: Duckworth. Franklin-Hall, Andrew, and Agnieszka Jaworska. 2017. Holding on to Reasons of the Heart: Cognitive Degeneration and the Capacity to Love. In Love, Reason and Morality, ed. Esther Kroeker and Katrien Schaubroeck, 20–38. New York: Routledge. Fromm, Erich. 1955. The Sane Society. New York: Rinehart and Winston.

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Haslanger, Sally. 2012. Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hopwood, Mark, 2014. Love’s Work: Eros and Moral Agency. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. ———. 2017. “The Extremely Difficult Realisation That Something Other Than Oneself Is Real”: Iris Murdoch on Love and Moral Agency. European Journal of Philosophy 26: 477–501. Hurka, Thomas. 2017. Love and Reasons: The Many Relationships. In Love, Reason and Morality, ed. Esther Kroeker and Katrien Schaubroeck, 163–180. New York: Routledge. Kolodny, N. 2003. Love as Valuing a Relationship. Philosophical Review 112 (2): 135–189. Krebs, Angelika. 2014. Between I and Thou – On the Dialogical Nature of Love. In Love and Its Objects. What Can We Care For? ed. Christian Maurer, Tony Milligan, and Kamila Pacovská, 7–24. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mele, Alfred. 2019. Manipulated Agents: A Window to Moral Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press. Nozick, Robert. 1990. Love’s Bond. In The Examined Life. Philosophical Meditations, 68–86. New York: Simon & Schuster. Rich, Adrienne. 1995. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978. WW Norton & Company. Setiya, K. (2014). Love and the Value of a Life. Philosophical Review, 123(3), p. 251–280. Shpall, Sam. 2018. A Tripartite Theory of Love. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 13: 91–124. Solomon, Robert C. 1994. About Love. Reinventing Romance for Our Times. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., Reprint 2006. Stocker, M. 1976. The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories. The Journal of Philosophy 73 (14): 453–446. Velleman, J. David. 1999. Love as a Moral Emotion. Ethics 109 (2): 338–374. ———. 2008. Beyond Price. Ethics 118: 191–212. Williams, Bernard. 1981. Persons, Character and Morality. In Moral Luck, 1–19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolf, S. 2004. The Moral of Moral Luck. In Setting the Moral Compass. Essays by Woman Philosophers, ed. C. Calhoun, 113–127. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Wynne, Clive. 2019. Dog Is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Zangwill, Nick. 2013. Love: Gloriously Amoral and Arational. Philosophical Explorations 16 (3): 298–314.

CHAPTER 2

Making Room for Love in Kantian Ethics Ernesto V. Garcia

2.1   Introduction Kant’s ethics is traditionally seen as defending an austere view of morality. With his focus on moral duty and exceptionless universal laws, Kant seems to leave out many important aspects of our moral lives, including personal feelings like sympathy and compassion and more partial relationships like friendship and love. As Bernard Williams writes in his classic work Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy about this general outlook: The important thing about morality is its spirit, its underlying aims, and the general picture of ethical life it implies. In order to see them, we shall need to look carefully at a particular concept, moral obligation […] Morality is distinguished by the special notion of obligation it uses, and by the significance it gives to it […] The philosopher who has given the purest, deepest, and most thorough representation of morality is Kant. But morality is not an invention of philosophers. It is the outlook, or, incoherently, part of the outlook, of almost all of us. (Williams 2006: 174)

E. V. Garcia (*) University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Cushing (ed.), New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72324-8_2

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For Williams, Kant’s excessive preoccupation with moral duty above all else reduces the moral agent to ‘a rational agent and no more’—that is, a kind of ‘noumenal self, outside time and causality’ that we privilege at the expense of ‘the concrete, empirically determined person that one usually takes oneself to be’ (Williams 2006: 63). Thus, it might be surprising for many readers to discover that Kant—as well as many contemporary Kantian ethical approaches—in fact have a lot to say about love in general.1 In this chapter, I try to answer three main questions: • What are Kant’s views about love? More specifically, what place, if any, is there for love in Kant’s own ethical theory? • What is the best way of thinking about love from a contemporary Kantian perspective? • How well does this broadly Kantian approach to love reflect our ordinary intuitions on these matters? This chapter has three parts. First, in “Kant’s Views About Love and Friendship”, I examine Kant’s views about love. In particular, I discuss his account of moral versus non-moral love as found throughout his various writings and show how this closely parallels his account of moral versus non-moral friendship. Second, in “Some Contemporary Kantian Approaches to Love and Friendship”, I look at some recent Kantian accounts of both friendship (Neera Kapur Badhwar) and love (J.  David Velleman), highlighting how they go beyond, and in many ways arguably improve upon, Kant’s own views via their appeal to Kant’s Formula of Humanity. Lastly, in “Conclusion: Assessing Kantian Moral Love”, I discuss the overall merits of what I call ‘Kantian moral love’ as found in all of these different approaches. I argue that while Kantian moral love may correctly identify, from the moral point of view, how we ought to act and think when loving other people, it fails to provide a complete account of love, crucially leaving out certain key elements from the wide range of loving relationships we find ourselves in, especially romantic love. That is, while Kantian moral love might offer us a morally ideal way to love other people, it falls short of capturing the full essence of love—mainly because love is not simply a moral affair but also a matter of the heart.

 By ‘Kantian’, I mean approaches that are broadly inspired by, even though sometimes substantively modifying or even rejecting, various aspects of Kant’s own ethical views. 1

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2.2   Kant’s Views About Love and Friendship What are Kant’s views about love? This issue is complicated by the fact that Kant identifies two very different kinds of love, what I will call ‘moral’ versus ‘non-moral’ or ‘natural’ love.2 We find this distinction in nearly all of major ethical writings. For Kant, non-moral or natural love—or what he refers to as amor complacentiae (‘love as a passion’)—has three main features. First, it is grounded in our sensible as opposed to rational nature. Kant describes such natural love as an ‘inclination’, a ‘propensity of sensation’, and a ‘matter of feeling’.3 Second, it disposes us to help others. As Kant puts it in Lectures on Ethics Collins, natural love amounts to ‘well-­ wishing from inclination’ or ‘well-doing […] arising from the heart’.4 And third, because it is a merely contingent inclination or feeling and thus for Kant not under our direct voluntary control, we cannot be morally required to possess and/or display such natural love in general—in keeping with Kant’s famous dictum that ‘ought implies can’.5 By contrast, moral love—or what Kant calls amor benevolentiae (‘love as benevolence’)—also has three features that are by and large opposites of non-moral love. First, it is grounded in our rational as opposed to sensible nature—or, as Kant puts it in Lectures on Ethics Collins, ‘arises from principles of the understanding’.6 Second and third, while moral love also leads us to help others, it does not merely dispose but rather morally obligates or requires us to do so. As Kant claims, moral love consists in ‘benevolence on principle’, ‘beneficence from duty itself’, ‘love from duty’, ‘well-doing from obligation’, and, more generally, a moral ‘commandment’ to be beneficent which ‘does not leave it to one’s discretionary choice to make this one’s principle’.7 In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant  Kant refers to such love as ‘pathological’ (pathologische), by which he means related to pa-thos, that is, to our passive, sensible natures, as opposed to being abnormal or diseased. In order to express Kant’s idea in a more neutral way, I have adopted the terminology ‘natural love’. For some helpful general discussions of Kant on love and friendship, see Paton 1993, Baron 2002, and Sensen 2013. 3  Gr. 4: 399, KpV 5: 83, and MdS 6: 402. Note: All Kant references are to volume and page numbers found in Immanuel Kants Schriften (Ausgabe der königlich preussischen Akademie Wis-senshaften (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1902–)). 4  VE 27: 413. 5  See Gr. 4: 399, KpV 5: 83, MdS 6: 402 – cf. Rel. 6: 51 for Kant’s discussion of his famous doctrine that ‘ought implies can’. 6  VE 27: 413. 7  VE 27: 413. For a Kantian account of love which rejects Kant’s own emphasis on beneficence, see Ebels-Duggan 2008. 2

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identifies what he calls our ‘duties of love’ as beneficence, gratitude, and sympathy, where by the latter he does not mean a merely passive or receptive feeling that we cannot directly control, but rather an active willingness to be open to and share in the feelings of others.8 Kant offers a concise summary of this overall distinction between what I am calling moral versus non-moral or natural love in the Groundwork, writing: It is in this way, no doubt, that we are to understand the passages from Scripture that contain the command to love one’s neighbor, even our enemy. For love as inclination cannot be commanded, but beneficence from duty itself—even if no inclination whatsoever impels us to it, indeed if natural and unconquerable aversion resists—is practical and not pathological love, which lies in the will and not in the propensity of sensation, in principles of action and not in melting compassion; and only the former can be commanded. (emphasis added)9

Notably, we find a parallel distinction in Kant’s treatment of friendship. Following Aristotle, Kant distinguishes between three basic kinds of friendship: two non-moral kinds of friendship, namely, (1) friendship based on need and (2) friendship based on taste or what Kant calls ‘aesthetic friendship’ and (3) friendship based on a moral attitude, or moral friendship. While this distinction involves many similar contrasts—for example, non-moral friendship is based on feelings, whereas moral friendship is based on reason; non-moral friendship cannot be morally required of us, whereas moral friendship can, and so forth—moral friendship differs from moral love for Kant in one important respect, namely, it incorporates elements of both love and respect. In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant draws a famous analogy between the two fundamental forces of repulsion and attraction in our physical world and the two fundamental principles that govern our ‘moral world’, namely, respect which makes us ‘keep our distance’ from other people and love which ‘brings us closer to them’.10 In general, moral friendship is more complex than moral love insofar as it involves both forces. That is, as Kant writes, moral friendship is ‘the union of two persons through equal mutual love and respect’.11 For Kant, moral  MdS 6: 452–479.  Gr. 4: 399. 10  MdS 6: 469. 11  MdS 6: 470. 8 9

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friendship requires not only being lovingly concerned about and sharing in each other’s well-being but also respecting the autonomy of the other person, all of this performed on mutually equal terms. Nevertheless, despite this key difference, the main parallel remains the same. In general, Kant sees a stark divide between moral and non-moral versions of love and friendship, a highly dualistic approach which reflects the more fundamental division between reason and our empirical nature in his broader ethical theory.

2.3   Some Contemporary Kantian Approaches to Love and Friendship In this section, I discuss some recent Kantian approaches to friendship (Badhwar) and love (Velleman). What is most striking about these approaches is that they largely ignore Kant’s official views about love and friendship, including his distinction between moral and non-moral versions of both phenomena. Instead, they notably take as their starting point an attractive feature of Kant’s ethics that we have not yet discussed: namely, Kant’s well-known ‘Formula of Humanity’ (FH). According to FH, we ought to ‘treat humanity, in your own person as well as the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means’.12 What does Kant mean by FH? To explain this, we need to answer two questions: (i) what does it mean to treat ourselves or other people as what Kant calls an ‘end-in-itself’ as opposed to a ‘mere means’?; and (ii) what exactly does Kant mean by ‘humanity’? First, what does it mean to treat somebody as an ‘end-in-itself’ versus as a ‘mere means’? To take a concrete example, consider how we treat something like, say, a tool such as a hammer, as a ‘mere means’. There are at least three basic attitudes involved. In general, we regard this object as: 1a. having merely instrumental value, that is, we value it solely for what it can achieve or do for us 1b. replaceable/fungible, that is, as simply interchangeable with any other equivalent thing 1c. merely conditionally valuable, that is, its value varies depending on changing external circumstances (e.g., we would regard it as no longer valuable if, say, we have already achieved or given up our original end)  Gr. 4: 429.

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By contrast, Kant insists that we ought to treat ‘ends-in-themselves’ in an exactly opposite way. That is, we should regard them as: 2a. having non-instrumental or final value, that is, we value them simply for their own sake as opposed to what they can achieve or do for us 2b. irreplaceable/non-fungible, that is, as somehow special or distinctive in its own right as opposed to something we would simply treat as exchangeable for some equivalent thing 2c. unconditionally valuable, that is, where it has an intrinsic value which stays the same regardless of changing external circumstances Second, what does Kant mean by ‘humanity’? In general, Kant identifies ‘humanity’ with our rational nature or, more specifically, our rational capacity to set and pursue ends for ourselves.13 On one traditional construal—as represented above in Williams’ reading of Kant—‘humanity’ refers to our bare abstract rational nature to the exclusion of all those particular traits which distinguish us as unique individuals. Seen this way, critics like Robert Noggle and Robin Dillon argue that Kant actually ‘ignores’ persons in his moral theory insofar as a person is ‘much more than a mere instance of rational agency’ but a ‘being with a particular life, a particular psychology, and a particular set of attachments, goals, commitments, and so on’ (Noggle 1999: 454) and so should be treated not merely ‘as instances of generic personhood, but as the whole fully specific person she is’, taking into account ‘precisely [those] contingencies that make me who I am’ (Dillon 1992: 74).14 By contrast, both of the thinkers discussed later reject this traditional construal, instead insisting that treating people as ‘ends-in-themselves’ not only allows for, but indeed requires, seeing other people in their full particularity. To summarize: In unpacking Kant’s FH, we have seen that treating the ‘humanity’ of other people as ‘ends-in-themselves’ involves regarding their rational agency as being non-instrumentally and unconditionally valuable as well as in some sense irreplaceable, and acting accordingly. In the rest of this section, I discuss how Badhwar and Velleman directly apply Kant’s FH to analyze friendship and love. More specifically, I want to explore the following question: How does viewing friends and people we love as Kantian ‘ends-in-themselves’ transform the way we think about the  See Gr. 4: 428, Rel. 6: 26, and MdS 6: 392.  For a detailed defense of Kant on these matters, see Garcia 2012.

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nature of friendship and love in general? In “Conclusion: Assessing Kantian Moral Love”, I conclude by critically evaluating the respective merits of Kant’s own view vis-à-vis these more contemporary Kantian approaches to friendship and love. In her classic article ‘Friends as Ends in Themselves’, Neera Kapur Badhwar straightforwardly claims that we should regard friends as Kantian ‘ends-in-themselves’. What does this amount to? Badhwar argues that in an ideal moral friendship, we should not view our friends as ‘mere means’ related to those ‘incidental features that make her useful or pleasurable’ (Badhwar 1989: 166). Instead, we should see them as having ‘an intrinsic, not instrumental value’ as well as being ‘a unique and irreplaceable individual’ on ‘account of what she essentially is’ (Badhwar 1989: 165), directly corresponding to (2a) and (2b). Further, our love for our friends should not vary relative to merely external changing circumstances. As Badhwar puts it, following Shakespeare, our love for our friends ‘is not love if it alters whenever it alteration finds’ (Badhwar 1989: 169), thus corresponding to (2c). However, unlike what she takes to be the type of ‘unconditional’ agapeistic love which loves someone totally independently of their specific qualities—say, merely in virtue of their being a ‘Human Being or Instance of (some F)’, for example, a rational agent—Badhwar maintains that the true object of our love should be the ‘unique’, ‘irreplaceable’, and ‘historical’ individual (Badhwar 1989: 169). In his highly influential discussion ‘Love as a Moral Emotion’, J. David Velleman likewise argues that truly loving people involves seeing them as Kantian end-in-themselves. Velleman rejects traditional accounts of love as a mere feeling, à la non-moral Kantian love, or as a drive or desire, à la Freud and many contemporary analytic philosophers. Instead, Velleman sees love as a special mode of attention and valuation (Velleman 2006: 76, 85–86). In particular, love consists in regarding our beloved—in an explicitly Kantian sense—as an ‘end’, where this amounts to ‘awareness of a value inhering in’ the person herself (Velleman 2006: 94). For Velleman, this involves valuing other people in a non-instrumental manner, not as ‘an independent aim to be realized’ but rather as something that we simply ‘act for the sake of’ (Velleman 2006: 89–90), in keeping with (2a). In addition, Velleman thinks that we should regard the beloved as having ‘dignity’ or ‘incomparable value’ in Kant’s sense, where what makes someone ‘truly irreplaceable is a value that commands appreciation for it as it is in itself, without comparison to anything else, and hence without substitutions’ (Velleman 2006: 99–100), in keeping with (2b).

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Lastly, to appreciate how Velleman incorporates (2c) in his account of love, we need to look more closely at how he thinks about the object of love, that is, the beloved. With Kant’s FH obviously in mind, Velleman claims that the true object of love is the other person’s ‘humanity’ or their ‘rational nature’ (Velleman 2006: 100). However, by ‘rational nature’, Velleman does not mean just our intellects, but rather our ‘capacity of appreciation or valuation’ more broadly, or put simply, ‘the core of our reflective concern’ in terms of ‘our capacity to love’ itself (Velleman 2006: 100). In this way, loving another person amounts to our heart ‘respond[ing] to […] another heart’ (Velleman 2006: 100). Nonetheless, while our love is grounded in the ‘universal value’ that the beloved has simply in virtue of ‘being a person’ or an ‘instance of rational nature’, the way we necessarily come to respond to this value is by loving their concrete ‘empirical persona’. This persona can include various ‘observable features’ about them like the way they talk or walk, or even how they wear their hat or sip their tea, which we take to be ‘external symbols or reminders’ of their internal value as persons which they retain regardless of any changing external circumstances (Velleman 2006: 100, 106), thus in keeping with (2c).

2.4   Conclusion: Assessing Kantian Moral Love What should we think about what I will broadly call ‘Kantian moral love’, where this is meant to include both Kant’s account of moral love spelled out in terms of ‘duties of love’ and contemporary Kantian approaches which see love as a ‘moral emotion’? In particular, how does (1) Kant’s official historical view, which insists upon a sharp dichotomy between feeling-­based ‘non-moral’ versus reason-based ‘moral’ friendship and love, measure up against (2) various contemporary Kantian approaches, according to which both friends and people we love are best understood as Kantian ‘ends-in-themselves’ in terms of being non-instrumentally and unconditionally valuable and in some sense irreplaceable or special in their own right? On the one hand, I think that contemporary Kantian approaches significantly improve upon Kant’s original views in two main ways. First, unlike Kant’s approach, they appeal to Kant’s FH to analyze the nature of love. This is a major advantage not only because many commentators regard FH as one of the most appealing aspects of Kant’s ethical theory, insofar as it identifies a highly attractive moral ideal—namely, treating people as ends-in-themselves with a fundamental dignity—that many seem to

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think underlies our modern-day conceptions of basic human rights. In addition, it also puts the emphasis in the right place when it comes to Kantian moral love. It turns our attention away from what Kant himself focuses on in his own account of moral love, namely, our acting from moral principle in terms of fulfilling our ‘duties of love’ such as beneficence and gratitude. Instead, it highlights what seems to be the true object of moral love, namely, people themselves understood in terms of their basic ‘humanity’. Second and relatedly, such contemporary Kantian approaches are much more akin to how we ordinarily think about love. In contrast to the type of universalistic love involved with Kant’s moral duties of love that we owe to all people in general—which might be more suitably called ‘philanthropy’, that is, ‘love of humanity’ in a very literal sense—these contemporary Kantian approaches instead demand that we attend to the individuality of those we love. By focusing on the beloved as a ‘unique’, ‘irreplaceable’, and ‘historical’ individual (Badhwar 1989: 69) or in terms of their concrete ‘empirical persona’ and the various ways that we ‘respond to [their] value through that persona’ (Velleman 2006: 107), such contemporary approaches to love—unlike Kant’s own view—instruct us to embrace the full concrete historical particularity of those we love, including our special relationships with them. On the other hand, I think that there is something deeply problematic about such contemporary Kantian approaches if they claim to offer a full analysis of the essence of love as such. We can see this most clearly in Velleman’s synopsis of his view, when he writes: ‘All that is essential to love, in my view, is that it disarms our emotional defenses towards an object in response to its incomparable value as a self-existent end’ (Velleman 2006: 99, emphasis added). What should we think about Velleman’s claim that what is ‘essential’ to love is how it emotionally disarms us in response to some incomparably valuable end-in-itself? The main problem is that Velleman’s account—which is open to two very different interpretations— seems to face a fundamental dilemma. On one horn of the dilemma, related to what I will call a ‘weak reading’ of Velleman, we can interpret him as merely claiming that, in love, (1) we necessarily make ourselves emotionally vulnerable in response to another person and (2) if Kant’s ethical views are true, then we are directly responding to a person who is end-in-itself with incomparable value regardless of whether we are actually aware of this or not. Both (1) and (2) seem correct, perhaps even trivially so. The basic worry is that, taken

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together, they do not establish Velleman’s substantive thesis that (3) love is a ‘moral emotion’. In fact, it (1) seems to be just a non-moral truism about love (viz., that in love, we invariably make ourselves emotionally vulnerable in response to another person), whereas (2) is just a doctrinal truism about Kant’s ethics (viz., that if Kant’s view is true, then people we love are ends-in-themselves with incomparable value). However, affirming the mere conjunction of the non-moral truism related to (1) and the moral truism related to (2) in no way establishes Velleman’s quite substantive thesis that (3) love is an inherently moral emotion. On the other horn of the dilemma, related to what I will call a ‘strong reading’ of Velleman, he is instead claiming that, in love, (1’) we make ourselves emotionally vulnerable in response to another person and (2’) this response necessarily involves our awareness of the other person as an end-in-itself with incomparable value. This reading squares better with Velleman’s own description of both respect and love, where he argues that the former involves ‘awareness of a value that arrests our self-love’, while the latter involves ‘awareness of a value that arrests […] our tendencies toward emotional self-protection from another person’—where the ‘value’ that we are aware of in both cases, as discussed earlier, is the ‘universal value’ of our ‘humanity’ understood as ‘a capacity of appreciation or valuation’ (Velleman 2006: 95, 100–101). While I think that this interpretation fits much better with Velleman’s text than the weak reading, the main problem is that it seems to involve a highly implausible account of what is ‘essential’ to love. Put differently, Velleman fails to identify either necessary or sufficient conditions for love here. First, Velleman fails to identify sufficient conditions for love. That is, even if we fulfill conditions (1’) and (2’), this still does not guarantee that we are actually loving the person in question. To give just a few examples, it seems possible that, à la Velleman, (1’) I make myself emotionally vulnerable to X and (2’) that I recognize and respond to X’s value as an ‘end-­ in-­itself’ based on their ‘capacity of appreciation or valuation’, but I do not actually love X but am instead merely: a) making an appeal to X’s fellow humanity to provide aid when I am in need b) asking for X to show mercy and refrain from harming me because X is an aggressor c) soliciting X to join me in some worthwhile moral cause d) simply liking X as a person and enjoying spending time with them

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In all these cases, I meet Velleman’s conditions insofar as (1’) I make myself emotionally vulnerable to X with all the attendant potential joys and sorrows and (2’) I am aware of, and, indeed, my response to X presupposes, that X shares a common invaluable humanity with me on the basis of which it makes sense for me to even morally appeal to them in the first place. Nevertheless, it seems like none of these scenarios—asking for X’s help, petitioning X to show mercy to me, hoping for X’s solidarity, or merely liking X as a person (where it seems too extreme to subsume all cases of liking another person to loving them)—necessarily requires that I actually love the other party in question. Second, Velleman fails to identify necessary conditions for love. That is, it seems possible for us to love somebody without satisfying both conditions (1’) and (2’). Take, for example, A romantically loving B.  I think Velleman is right that this typically involves (1’): in virtue of romantically loving B, A makes themselves emotionally vulnerable to B. However, (2’) does not seem necessary here. That is, it seems fully possible for A to romantically love B while not appreciating or ever even being aware of the fact that B has ‘incomparable value’ as a kind of Kantian ‘end-in-itself’.15 In the end, to partially defend Kant’s original views about love and friendship, I think it is important to retain at least some version of Kant’s distinction between moral versus non-moral friendship and/or love. That is, I think we should avoid overly moralized accounts of love and friendship that exclude from the outset the very possibility of non-moral versions of each phenomenon. Indeed, Kant himself insists that what we are calling non-moral or natural love still has an important place in our human lives, even describing it at times as ‘very beautiful’, ‘amiable’, and deserving of our ‘praise and encouragement’ although falling short of full-­ fledged ‘moral worth’.16 To her credit, Badhwar recognizes this in her Kantian analysis of friendship. While she praises what she calls moral ‘end friendship’ as ‘the best, most complete’ kind of friendship, she nonetheless affirms, following Aristotle, that there exist many different kinds of valuable non-moral friendships, too (Badhwar 1989: 165–166). By contrast, Velleman’s account falls prey to this pitfall. His overly moralized Kantian account of love as a ‘moral emotion’—where love 15  Cf. Berit Brogaard’s claim that it seems we can romantically love somebody ‘for any reason or no reason at all’ and that such love does not ‘require us to appreciate the positive value of an-other person’ (Brogaard 2015: 73). 16  See Gr. 4: 398 and KpV 5: 82.

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necessarily involves being aware of and responding to the value of another person’s humanity in the Kantian sense—fails to capture what is essential to all cases of love. Seen in this light, I think that Berit Brogaard’s remarks about romantic love in contrast to what she calls ‘companionate love’— where the latter is closely akin to Velleman’s view—are instructive here. As Brogaard writes: I don’t think there’s a single kind of true love, and I fully believe that romantic love is real love. It’s as real and true as the love you feel for your grandfather or your childhood friend. Granted, it’s different from companionate love and attachment love, but it is, nonetheless, love (Brogaard 2015: xii, first emphasis added)

At the end of the day, I think we should recognize that there can be many different kinds of love, both moral and non-moral in nature. To borrow Kant’s terminology from his account of the ‘highest good’ in the second Critique,17 Kantian moral love represents a ‘supreme good’ (supremum)—that is, the best or ideal form of love between people, at least from a moral perspective—contra Velleman, it does not, and indeed as Kant himself insists, cannot, represent the ‘complete good’ (consummatum)— that is, the full range or essence of our loving human relationships in general.18

2.5   References Badhwar, Neera Kapur. 1989. Friends as Ends in Themselves. In Eros, Agape, and Philia: Readings in the Philosophy of Love, ed. Alan Soble, 165–188. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House. Baron, Marcia. 2002. Love and Respect in the Doctrine of Virtue. In Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretive Essays, ed. Mark Timmons, 391–407. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brogaard, Berit. 2015. On Romantic Love: Simple Truths About a Complex Emotion. Oxford: Oxford Press. Dillon, Robin. 1992. Care and Respect. In Explorations in Feminist Ethics: Theory and Practice, ed. Eve Browning Cole and Susan Coultrap-McQuin, 69–81. Bloomington: Midland Press.  KpV 5: 110.  I would like to thank both Simon Cushing and Nicholas Vallone for their extremely helpful and insightful feedback on this chapter. 17 18

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Ebels-Duggan, Kyla. 2008. Against Beneficence: A Normative Account of Love. Ethics 119: 142–170. Garcia, Ernesto V. 2012. A New Look at Kantian Respect for Persons. Kant Yearbook 4: 69–90. Kant, Immanuel. 1996. Metaphysics of Morals (MdS). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997a. Critique of Practical Reason (KpV). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997b. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Gr). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997c. Lectures on Ethics (VE). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998. Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Rel). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997. Love and Solipsism. In Love Analyzed, ed. Roger Lamb, 123–152. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Noggle, Robert. 1999. Kantian Respect and Particular Persons. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 29: 449–478. Paton, H.J. 1993. Kant on Friendship. In Friendship: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Neera Kapur Badhwar, 133–154. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sensen, Oliver. 2013. Friendship in Kant’s Moral Thought. In Thinking About Friendship: Historical and Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Damian Caluori, 143–160. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Velleman, J. David. 2006. Love as a Moral Emotion. In Self to Self: Selected Essays, 70–109. New York: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Bernard. 2006. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. New  York: Routledge Press.

CHAPTER 3

Iris Murdoch and the Epistemic Significance of Love Cathy Mason

3.1   Introduction In The Sovereignty of Good (1970), Iris Murdoch gives love an intellectual and epistemic standing with which many philosophers would be uncomfortable. She says not only that it is epistemically valuable—a claim already too strong for many, given the lover’s seeming tendency to misperceive1— but also that we do not see reality as it truly is unless we love. This is a puzzling claim. We tend to think that the very point of objective knowledge is to abstract away from any personal, particular point of view, taking something like what Bernard Williams (1978) calls ‘the absolute conception’ as our standard. And we often think of love as a paradigm of just such a personal, particular—and perhaps distorted—point of view. It thus seems precluded from playing the epistemic role that Murdoch assigns to it. Part of my aim in the present chapter is to offer an 1  Keller (2004) and Stroud (2006), for example, suggest that friendship constitutively involves epistemic partiality.

C. Mason (*) Wadham College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Cushing (ed.), New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72324-8_3

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interpretation of the conception of love in The Sovereignty of Good such that this seeming tension between love and objective knowledge is dissolved.2 For Murdoch, love has a particular significance in the perception of moral reality. There is an obvious causal connection between love and morality: love can be a powerful factor in motivating us to act in morally admirable ways. However, Murdoch’s claim is that love is also epistemically significant for our ethical lives. On the Murdochian interpretation, ‘loving thy neighbor’ entails not only being motivationally affected by one’s neighbor’s well-being, but also standing in an epistemic relation to them that involves knowledge and continuous progression toward truer understanding of them. This may seem counterintuitive, but I will suggest that there are good reasons to take Murdoch’s account seriously. Her claim is not ultimately as puzzling as it first appears. I begin in “Murdoch’s Moral Framework” by outlining Murdoch’s moral framework and the role of love within it. In “Alternative Interpretations of Murdochian Love”, I then explore two contrasting interpretations of Murdochian love proposed by Velleman (1999) and Hopwood (2014, 2017) and discuss the ways in which each fails to do justice to the full epistemic role Murdoch assigns to love. In “Love and Realism”, I explore the notion of objectivity that underlies Murdoch’s account. In “Love as a Virtue and a Perceptual Sensitivity”, I argue that Murdochian love is best interpreted as a virtue, with a particularly lofty position in the hierarchy of the virtues. This allows Murdoch’s claims about love’s epistemic value to be understood while retaining her claims about objectivity. My aims are not, however, only exegetical. In “The Everyday Concept of Love: A Defense of Murdoch”, I argue that this reconstructive exercise yields an illuminating account of our ordinary conception of love.

2  In this chapter I shall focus on Murdoch’s conception of love in The Sovereignty of Good (1970) and other early works: “Vision and Choice in Morality” (1956) and “The Sublime and the Good” (1959). Her overarching ethical vision in later work such as Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) is somewhat altered, becoming more heavily Platonic and mystical. This corresponds with a linguistic change in Murdoch: in later work she refers primarily to eros rather than love. There is thus reason to think that her conception of love may have similarly developed and altered over time, and I shall not examine the later conception. I will use the term ‘Murdochian love’ to refer only to the conception of love found in her early works.

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3.2   Murdoch’s Moral Framework Murdoch’s discussion of love is framed by the conviction that there is an essential kind of moral activity that is not reducible to publicly observable actions. She calls this neglected kind of activity ‘attention’.3 According to Murdoch, the dominance of broadly behaviorist theories of mind in ‘modern moral philosophy’ led to the conviction that “morality resides at the point of action” (Murdoch 1970: 16) and that moral agency must therefore relate only to publicly observable outward action. Murdoch is wholly resistant to this line of thinking, which she regards as distorting our understanding of what is at stake in ethics by disregarding important areas of our ethical lives. Such a conception of morality automatically rules out phenomena such as attention from moral consideration, but Murdoch claims that these phenomena are deeply morally significant. She thus advocates re-emphasizing the importance of various concepts that were peripheral in contemporary moral philosophy, and I shall focus here on her attempted reinstatement of the concept of love. Murdoch’s basic idea here is that we must attend to objects, must see them in a morally significant way, before we can hope for our publicly observable actions to be morally worthy. More importantly, she insists that attention is itself a fundamentally moral activity. Such attention, she thinks, is a kind of love. Murdoch thus begins two of her most famous essays with assertions of the significance of love in ethics. She claims that “love is a central concept in morals” (Murdoch 1970: 2) and that “we need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central” (Murdoch 1970: 46). Having declared that love is a central moral concept, she specifies that one role love fulfills is epistemic: our coming to grasp moral truths, and the progressive deepening of our grasp of them, is a manifestation of love. It is not obvious that love is morally and epistemically valuable. Love can appear to be as much bound up with illusion as perception and to be capable of leading to cruelty as well as self-sacrifice. (Think, for example, of Othello’s claim after murdering Desdemona that he has “loved not wisely but too well”.) Nonetheless, Murdoch presents love as fulfilling a crucial ethical and epistemic role:

3

 This is a term taken from Simone Weil (1956).

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Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. (Murdoch 1959: 51) Love is knowledge of the individual. (Murdoch 1970: 28) In particular situations ‘reality’ as that which is revealed by the patient eye of love is an idea entirely comprehensible to the ordinary person. (Murdoch 1970: 40)

Murdoch here describes the ordinary concept of love as having an epistemic dimension: it involves knowledge, discovery, or perception of the individual and reality. Love is thus presented as fulfilling some kind of epistemic role: it in some sense involves grasping truths. Murdoch illustrates this epistemic role of love with an example that is, for her, a paradigm case of both moral and epistemic progress through loving attention: A mother, whom I shall call M, feels hostility to her daughter-in-law, whom I shall call D. M finds D quite a good-hearted girl, but while not exactly common yet certainly unpolished and lacking in dignity and refinement. D is inclined to be pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile. …Time passes, and it could be that M settles down with a hardened sense of grievance and a fixed picture of D, imprisoned (if I may use a question-­ begging word) by the cliché: my poor son has married a silly vulgar girl. However, the M of the example is an intelligent and well-intentioned person, capable of self-criticism, capable of giving careful and just attention to an object which confronts her. M tells herself: ‘I am old-fashioned and conventional. I may be prejudiced and narrow-minded. I may be snobbish. I am certainly jealous. Let me look again.’ Here I assume that M observes or at least reflects deliberately about D, until gradually her vision of D alters….D is discovered to be not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous, not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully youthful, and so on. (Murdoch 1970: 17–18)

Murdoch describes M’s transition here as a transition to viewing D ‘lovingly’. Although not attended by any outward change in M’s behavior, it is intended by Murdoch to be a fundamentally moral transition, one in which M’s moral standing improves. As M lovingly attends to D, she

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becomes able to perceive features of D that were previously obscured or distorted by latent selfishness and prejudice. For example, as M attends lovingly to D, D’s delightful youthfulness, which was previously obscured by M’s snobbery and jealousy, becomes discernible to M. Murdoch’s claim is thus that love fulfills an epistemic role: love involves attending to reality, and results in a deepening understanding of reality. She understands attending to reality not merely as something that one can do lovingly but as itself “an exercise of love” (Murdoch 1970: 42). Such loving attention, she suggests, will progressively lead one toward a deeper, more adequate conception of reality: “[w]hen M is just and loving she sees D as she really is” (Murdoch 1970: 37). In the next section I shall explore two interpretations of Murdoch that offer ways of spelling out how Murdochian love performs this function. I will suggest that both fall short of Murdoch’s own claims about love’s epistemic significance.

3.3   Alternative Interpretations of Murdochian Love Some philosophical discussions of love have assumed that there is a tension between morality and love.4 By contrast, both Velleman (1999) and Hopwood (2014, 2017) follow Murdoch and use her thought in articulating models of love that aim to vindicate its moral significance and that make some place for love’s epistemic significance. However, both square Murdoch’s thought that love is a moral activity with her thought that love is epistemically rich only at the expense of denying further aspects of her view; they connect love and morality but fail to explain the broader connection between love and knowledge. An alternative account of love is thus needed to elucidate its role in Murdoch’s thought. I will consider Velleman and Hopwood’s accounts in turn, before discussing Murdoch’s background commitment to realism in “Alternative Interpretations of Murdochian Love” and offering my own account of Murdochian love in “Love and Realism”.

4  See, for example, Williams’ (1981) discussion of the permissibility of saving one’s wife rather than a stranger, suggesting that the demands of close relationships might conflict with those of morality.

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In an account of love that he aligns with Murdoch’s, Velleman argues that love is a rational state capable of being justified by reasons.5 On his account, love constitutes an appreciation of inherent value in the beloved which brings with it an emotional vulnerability to them. Specifically, he regards love as involving an “arresting awareness” (Velleman 1999: 360) and appreciation of the value of rational natures and therefore suggests that Murdochian love resembles Kantian respect.6 He claims that responding to the value of rational natures with respect is a rationally ‘required minimum’ and that responding with love is an ‘optional maximum’. This is an epistemically rich account of love insofar as love is understood by Velleman as constituting a recognition of value. However, this cannot be Murdoch’s conception of love. Velleman suggests that love is a morally and rationally optional response to the unconditional value of rational natures, but Murdoch contends that love is morally necessary. In response to Kant’s contention that only practical love (performing loving actions) can be a duty, Murdoch argues that ‘pathological love’ (love as an affective state or quality of consciousness) also matters morally: “I do not agree that only practical love can be commanded….Pathological love can be commanded too, and indeed if love is a purification of the imagination, must be commanded” (Murdoch 1959: 55). For Murdoch, what we are morally ‘commanded’ to do extends far beyond publicly observable actions. Her claim is that we are also obliged to love in the sense of lovingly attending to others (‘purifying the imagination’). For Murdoch, an unloving perspective will simply not allow one to perceive truths about the world that the lover can see, and therefore lovingly attending to the world is both epistemically and morally obligatory. Moreover, on Velleman’s account, love does not reveal the features of persons that Murdochian love reveals. For Murdoch, love is an acknowledgment of the reality of particulars outside oneself, whereas, for Velleman, it is directed at the same universal aspect of each person, their rational nature.7 Murdoch explicitly criticizes Kant for exactly this failure:

5  For example, Velleman writes that “[t]his hypothesis would explain why love is an exercise in ‘really looking’, as Murdoch claims” (Velleman 1999: 361) 6  Bagnoli (2003) also suggests that Kantian respect and Murdochian love are “significantly analogous”: they “exhibit a similar phenomenology and work likewise, as constraints on deliberation” (Bagnoli 2003: 506, 485). 7  Clarke (2012) emphasizes the idea that Murdochian attention involves seeing an object “in all of its (significant) particularity”, and the political potential of this idea for overcoming prejudice (Clarke 2012: 238).

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Kant does not tell us to respect whole particular tangled-up individuals, but to respect the universal reason in their breasts. In so far as we are rational and moral we are all the same, and in some mysterious sense transcendent to history. (Murdoch 1959: 51)

Given Velleman’s belief in the similarity between Murdochian love and Kantian respect, it is unsurprising that this criticism of Kantian respect can equally be applied to Velleman’s account of love. For Murdoch, love directs one’s attention “towards the great surprising variety of the world” (Murdoch 1970: 66). On the Murdochian account, loving another person involves directing one’s attention toward a particular concrete individual, not simply toward a universal abstract property instantiated in them. Murdoch’s emphasis on particularity thus precludes Velleman’s account from capturing Murdochian love.8 Hopwood’s account, on the other hand, correctly emphasizes the particularity of Murdochian love. He contends that Murdoch’s conception of love is that of Platonic eros, which he understands as follows: [E]ros is (i) a form of desire that is (ii) directed at a particular object whose value (iii) cannot be captured under a closed description, that (iv) engages the imagination, and that (v) carries with it the awareness of a normative demand on the subject. (Hopwood 2014: 61)

A closed description, for Hopwood, is one in which the object can be exhaustively characterized in terms of its properties, where one’s relation is to any object that falls under the relevant description.9 To desire an object whose value cannot be captured in a closed description is therefore to value an irreducibly particular object. According to Hopwood, eros is a form of desire, an affective state that nonetheless involves recognition of the capacity of the beloved, as such, to place demands on oneself, enabling one to see one’s response to the object of love as potentially inadequate or as falling short in some way. Hopwood thus claims that love has an 8  Murdoch does believe that ‘the Good’ is also an object of love, which appears to be in tension with this. However, she maintains that it is a ‘concrete universal’ (Murdoch 1970: 29). 9  Hopwood illustrates the idea of loving someone under a closed description with the following example: “If we were to propose to take Romeo away and replace him with another person possessing exactly the same set of characteristics…Juliet would presumably not be happy to accept the swap. Her desire for Romeo is a desire for a particular individual, and precisely because of this, the value that she sees in him cannot be captured under a closed description” (Hopwood 2014: 8).

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epistemic component, the potential to be aware of one’s response as failing to do justice to its object.10 The idea that the object of love cannot be captured under a closed description introduces into this account an ineliminable particularity. On this account, love is not a response to an abstract or universal property, but to a particular person or object. Moreover, on Hopwood’s account, love plays both moral and epistemic roles, since it is understood as a form of desire that brings with it an awareness of normative demands upon the agent. However, Hopwood’s account does not do full justice to the epistemic role Murdoch assigns to love. Murdoch contends that love is important not only in the perception of normative demands that loving awareness of objects places on the lover, but in the perception of objects themselves. Love, for Murdoch, primarily reveals objects themselves rather than normative demands that agents face. She claims that “love is knowledge of the individual” (Murdoch 1970: 28): loving attention is necessary for any truly adequate perception of a person, object, or situation itself, not merely knowledge of normative demands. Hopwood’s account of Murdochian love is therefore, like Velleman’s, too narrow to account for the fullness of the epistemic role Murdoch assigns to it.

3.4   Love and Realism One possible way of affording love the broad epistemic role Murdoch insists upon would be to understand moral reality as constitutively dependent upon the subject. This is suggested by Hopwood’s claim that it is in virtue of loving the object that one sees it as making demands on oneself. One way of reading this would be as suggesting that there is no fixed moral reality for the observer to respond to that exists apart from the observer’s perception and their love. On this reading, the reality that places demands upon the observer does so, at least in part, because it is loved, not vice versa. Thus interpreted, Hopwood suggests that Murdoch should not be read as subscribing to a robust form of realism. If the claim that love enables us to get to the objective truth about the beloved is relinquished, the apparent tension between love (a seemingly personal and 10  Hopwood depends heavily on Murdoch’s later work, particularly Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992). Although Hopwood’s account does not capture Murdoch’s early conception of love, it may capture her later conception of it.

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particular state) and knowledge (apparently objective) disappears. If the objectivity of moral reality is given up, there can be no tension between it and the epistemic role Murdoch assigns to love: love reveals moral reality because that reality is (at least partly) constituted by its being loved. However, Murdoch is committed to the idea that the truth of moral claims is constitutively dependent on reality outside the observer’s perceptions and beliefs. M, for example, is described as ‘discovering’ D’s moral qualities, suggesting that such features do not depend on her. Murdoch also describes M’s loving re-evaluation of D as revealing her “as she really is” (Murdoch 1970: 37), suggesting that the moral evaluation depends on D’s characteristics, rather than on M. Pervasive throughout The Sovereignty of Good is the image of the moral life as an exercise of vision. Importantly, Murdoch conceives of this vision as revealing what is there independently of the perceiver’s conception of it or attitude toward it. In her discussion of the arts as introductions to (and initial participations in) the moral life, Murdoch claims that what is required of both is “unsentimental, detached, unselfish, objective attention” (Murdoch 1970: 64). Elsewhere, she focuses on the connection between the real and the true: “the realism (ability to perceive reality) required for goodness is a kind of intellectual ability to perceive what is true” (Murdoch 1970: 64). In fact, in her criticism of the ‘current view’ of persons, she states that “we have lost the vision of a reality separate from ourselves” (Murdoch 1970: 46). Love, she suggests, helps us to discern what is true, a reality that is separate from ourselves. Murdoch therefore cannot be suggesting that love reveals moral reality in virtue of moral reality being dependent upon the perceiver’s loving stance.11 Indeed, Murdoch suggests that ‘fantasy’, the projections of one’s own self in one’s view of the world, is the “chief enemy of excellence in morality” (Murdoch 1970: 59). For her, projections of the self in one’s vision of the world are fundamentally distorting. It is by directing one’s attention away from the self and the distorting fantasies generated by the selfish ego that moral reality is progressively revealed. On her account, moral reality thus cannot constitutively depend on the subject. How, then, can we make sense of the idea that loving attention reveals a reality that is separate from the observer? I want to suggest that Murdoch’s claim is best understood in the context of her repudiation of 11  For more on Murdoch’s metaethics, see Jordan (2014). He understands her as a realist committed to cognitivism, success theory, and objectivism.

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the idea that objective reality is that which is revealed by value-neutral perception. Rather, she claims that all perception itself is morally imbued.12 The moral realist, Murdoch argues, ought not to attempt to strive to demonstrate the objectivity of morality through its assimilation into the ‘hard’ world of impersonal facts that purport to be ‘neutral’ and available to anyone, but instead should reject such a model of objectivity: [G]oodness is connected with knowledge: not with impersonal quasi-­ scientific knowledge of the ordinary world, whatever that may be, but with a refined and honest perception of what is really the case. (Murdoch 1970: 38)

Murdoch’s suggestion here is that ‘impersonal quasi-scientific knowledge’ is not all there is to knowledge. Indeed, she claims that the knowledge that is morally significant (that to which ‘goodness is connected’) and that reveals ‘what is really the case’ is not such value-neutral knowledge at all. In saying this, she rejects the idea that something like Williams’ absolute conception will reveal all truths that are available to be known. Moral knowledge, that is, might require concepts that make sense only within the moral life. Murdoch parodies the idea that all morally significant facts will be revealed by value-neutral perception by suggesting that it models morality on something like a simple shopping trip: On this view one might say that morality is assimilated to a visit to a shop. I enter the shop in a condition of totally responsible freedom, I objectively estimate the features of the goods, and I choose. The greater my objectivity and discrimination the larger the number of products from which I can select….I find the image of man which I have sketched above both alien and implausible. (Murdoch 1970: 8–9)

Again, Murdoch’s suggestion here is that value-neutral perception will not reveal all that is of moral significance. On her account, the moral life is not reducible to a set of choices made between the same discrete and neutrally evaluable objects in the way that shopping might be. Rather, the very objects and features one picks out are morally significant, and

12  Mulhall (2000) argues that, for Murdoch, we are continuously engaged with moral value, and that this is a core tenet in her rejection of the existence of a distinction between fact and value.

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sustained loving attention may reveal very different objects to those one initially seemed to see. On Murdoch’s account, many objectively real objects and qualities can be understood only from within the perspective of a human, value-laden conceptual scheme. Broackes (2012) describes this as Murdoch asserting that “we should allow the world to contain all that meets the gaze of a just and loving moral perceiver” (Broackes 2012: 47); according to Murdoch, the objectively real includes that which is perceived from a personal perspective. Murdoch’s claim is that a human moral scheme is necessary to fully perceive reality. For example, the qualities that M comes to see in D are real qualities that D possesses, but could not be assimilated into an impersonal or unloving account of D. There is no more basic description that might capture what it means for D to be ‘delightfully youthful’ and certainly no non-evaluative equivalent.13 For Murdoch, the applicability of moral concepts cannot be understood from outside the moral schema itself. The very concepts necessary for understanding the world themselves can themselves be understood only ‘in depth’, from the perspective of an agent embedded in moral practices who is to some extent virtuous.14

3.5   Love as a Virtue and a Perceptual Sensitivity Murdoch claims, then, that love has an irreducible epistemic role: it involves knowledge or perception of reality. This reality is to be understood as existing independently of being loved, but perceptible only to the person who lovingly attends to it. I have suggested that neither Velleman’s nor Hopwood’s interpretations of Murdochian love do justice to both the broad scope of love’s epistemic role in her thinking and to her realism about what is to be perceived. In this section, I will suggest that Murdoch thinks of love as a virtue and outline the conception of virtue that she has in mind. On her account, the virtues in general are epistemic and hierarchically ordered traits, and love occupies a particularly lofty position in the hierarchy of the virtues. 13  Murdoch thus claims that moral philosophers’ task is “the provision of rich and fertile conceptual schemes” (Murdoch 1970: 45): had M possessed only concepts such as ‘juvenile’ and ‘vulgar’, she would have been unable to recognize that D is in fact ‘refreshingly simple’ and ‘gay’. 14  Murdoch’s view is similar to that defended by McDowell (1979, 2011). In “Aesthetic Value, Objectivity and the Fabric of the World” (1998), McDowell explicitly rejects Williams’ absolute conception of objectivity.

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A seldom remarked-upon but significant feature of Murdoch’s conception of love is that she repeatedly refers to love as a virtue and includes it among lists of the virtues in discussions of the moral life. This, I want to suggest, is central to understanding how Murdoch retains her commitment to moral realism while claiming that love involves knowledge. As I have discussed, Murdoch considers love to be a desirable quality. Further, she suggests that it is not merely desirable or pleasant, but that it is morally necessary: it is ‘commanded’. As such, she thinks of it as a virtue: All just vision, even in the strictest problems of the intellect, and a fortiori when suffering or wickedness have to be perceived, is a moral matter. The same virtues, in the end the same virtue (love), are required throughout, and fantasy (self) can prevent us from seeing a blade of grass just as it can prevent us from seeing another person. (Murdoch 1970: 70) As we deepen our notions of the virtues we introduce relationship and hierarchy. Courage, which seemed at first to be something on its own, a sort of specialised daring of the spirit, is now seen to be a particular operation of wisdom and love….It would be impossible to have only one virtue unless it were a very trivial one such as thrift. (Murdoch 1970: 95)

Here, Murdoch refers to love as a virtue and lists it among more commonly recognized virtues such as courage and wisdom.15 On this conception of love, it is not simply an episodic attitude, but a deeply important character trait. The virtues are often thought of as traits that involve certain dispositions: dispositions to think, act, perceive, and feel in certain ways. In the first aforementioned quotation, Murdoch suggests that love is required for ‘just vision’. Extrapolating from this and from cases such as M and D, we come to a conception of the kind of virtue that Murdoch has in mind. Murdoch conceives of love as a virtue that entails the disposition to know, grasp, or understand an object of attention ever more adequately. On the Murdochian account, then, love involves a disposition to see truly, to (progressively) perceive individuals as they 15  I am here leaving open exactly what kind of virtue ethicist Murdoch is, as well as the role of the virtues in her overarching account of ethics. My argument depends only on the uncontroversial ideas that she is deeply impressed by the importance of the virtues and that she regards them as having a crucial role in the moral life. McLean (2000) offers an argument against identifying Murdoch as a virtue ethicist, noting that she is more influenced by Plato than by Aristotle and is therefore at odds with neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics. This, however, is no reason to think that she is not some form of virtue ethicist.

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really are. The connection between love and knowledge is thus intimate: love is necessarily truthful because love is (at least partly) constituted by progression toward ever more adequate knowledge of its object. We can shed light on the connection between love and moral knowledge by considering the general role of the virtues in Murdoch’s thinking. For Murdoch, the virtues are reliable sensitivities to certain features of the world, and as a virtue, love involves such a perceptual sensitivity. On this account, the virtues in general therefore look as much like epistemic dispositions as affective or motivational dispositions. Murdoch states: “virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is” (Murdoch 1970: 93). Elsewhere she writes that “anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue” (Murdoch 1970: 84). For Murdoch, virtues are thus highly epistemically significant traits: they are traits that enable a kind of perception that arises only from a human and normatively rich standpoint. Given this conception of virtue, love is necessarily truth-­ conducive: one can only perceive or be sensitive to real features of the world.16 This knowledge or perception is connected with action; the perceptual sensitivities that constitute virtues are manifested in dispositions to act. The person who perceives the true extent of these demands, Murdoch suggests, will act in ‘obedience’ to reality: [T]he idea of a patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation, presents the will not as unimpeded movement but as something very much more like ‘obedience’. (Murdoch 1970: 40)

In other words, Murdoch suggests that the agent who perceives the full moral significance of a situation is often not left with an open choice about how to respond. In order to discern the true moral contours of a situation in the first place, the agent must attend in a way that is loving. Attending lovingly is motivationally and affectively laden; it eventuates in ‘obedience’ to the moral demands of what is perceived.17 16  A similar conception of virtue is proposed by McDowell (1979), who also understands the virtues as perceptual sensitivities and argues for the claim that ‘virtue is knowledge’. 17  It seems plausible that there will be degrees of love, so not all love will entail complete moral motivation. But insofar as one is loving, one will be motivated to act in accordance with what is perceived.

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Murdochian love is not, however, simply a form of clinical precision. In relation to the example of M and D, Murdoch notes that “what M is ex hypothesi attempting to do is not just to see D accurately but to see her justly or lovingly” (Murdoch 1970: 23). The ‘just’ in this quote is significant: seeing lovingly is not opposed to accuracy, but is a far richer form of vision, a form of vision reaching beyond simple accuracy, which may be difficult to achieve. In approaching the object of love from the loving perspective, one approaches it from a position into which is built a commitment to understanding the object justly and in its full complexity. Moreover, the affective richness of the loving perspective allows for a depth in one’s grasp of one’s concepts that is transformative of them. The loving perceiver does not take the same concepts that could be grasped from a detached perspective and apply them to a fixed scenario, but they rather have conceptual resources that differ from those of the unloving perceiver, which transform what one can perceive.18 To illustrate this, compare the ballet lover’s experience while watching Swan Lake to the experience of a reluctant audience member with no interest in ballet. While both would have a visual experience of the same thing, they would see very different things. The ballet lover might see graceful arabesques and lively grand jetés within an innovative production of the ballet, whereas the disinterested audience member might simply see dancers moving and jumping. Even if we imagine that the disinterested audience member has better eyesight, so that their perception of the ballet is more visually accurate and they are able to track more precisely the exact movements that the dancers make, we would plausibly think that their vision and understanding of it was importantly lacking. The loving attention that the ballet lover pays to the performance plausibly alters what they discern in it, enabling them to better understand the ballet as a whole. To love, for Murdoch, therefore entails attending to particular objects from a virtuous perspective which involves an affective component. This affective component includes generosity and an appreciative understanding of the object of love. By viewing the object from this perspective, the good qualities that it genuinely possesses become visible. Viewing others in this way enables one to perceive real qualities that they genuinely 18  Murdoch writes, “Knowledge of a value concept is to be understood…in depth, and not in terms of switching on to some given impersonal network….We do not simply, through being rational and knowing ordinary language, ‘know’ the meaning of all necessary moral words” (Murdoch 1970: 29).

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possess, but which, without attending lovingly, one will not be sensitive to. For example, in Othello, were one to view Othello from a detached, impersonal standpoint, his character would undoubtedly be unappealing. However, the play derives its power and its tragedy from enabling one to perceive him from a loving perspective, from which he can be seen as partially noble, yet at the same time deeply mistaken and cruelly blind. These qualities are a genuine part of the object of perception, but they are not visible from a perspective external to love. This account of love as a virtue that is a reliable perceptual sensitivity enables Murdoch to maintain that love is epistemically beneficial. However, this on its own does not entail that love is necessary for true vision, nor that it is uniquely epistemically significant. In the following sections, I shall suggest that these features of love can be understood as a result of Murdoch’s acceptance of the unity and hierarchy of the virtues, respectively. The Unity of the Virtues Many virtue ethicists have been tempted by the thought that the virtues are somehow unified.19 Murdoch too understands the perceptual sensitivities constituting the virtues in this way. In discussing this, she claims that an examination of everyday moral virtues reveals ways in which they are deeply intertwined and ordered. Again, this is suggested by the above-­ mentioned text: As we deepen our notions of the virtues we introduce relationship and hierarchy.…It would be impossible to have only one virtue unless it were a very trivial one such as thrift. (Murdoch 1970: 95)

Murdoch’s claim is thus that no single virtue can be understood, let alone possessed, in isolation.20 On her conception, the virtues are perceptual sensitivities to certain features of the world. But the features that call for kindness, for example, must be understood in relation to those that call 19  For more recent defenses of the unity of virtue, see Badhwar (1996), Wolf (2007), and Toner (2014). Badhwar and Wolf defend qualified versions of the thesis. For skepticism about the unity of the virtues, see Sreenivasan (2009). 20  She adds the caveat “unless it were a very trivial one such as thrift” (Murdoch 1970: 95). However, the kind of thrift that is virtuous plausibly involves other virtues such as prudence and a proper appreciation of goods (in order to distinguish appreciative thrift from mere stinginess).

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for justice, and so on: the fullest form of kindness will be sensitive to the demands of justice. Murdoch argues not only that the virtues cannot be defined in isolation but that they cannot be possessed in isolation: one cannot be truly courageous, for example, without also having the wisdom to know how and when to act courageously. This does not entail that one cannot possess any virtue to any degree without possessing the other virtues with which they are conceptually interconnected, but that the virtues cannot be possessed in isolation insofar as one could not fully possess any virtue without possessing the virtues with which it is interconnected. She writes, for instance: [T]he best kind of courage (that which would make a man act unselfishly in a concentration camp) is steadfast, calm, temperate, intelligent, loving. (Murdoch 1970: 57)

On this view, lack of one virtue can impose a limitation on the extent to which one can possess another, and the fullest form of any virtue will involve further virtues. For Murdoch, love, as a virtue, is therefore interrelated with every other virtue: to be loving, in the fullest and truest sense, involves being just, wise, honest, and so forth. Love, on this account, is therefore necessary for the full possession of any virtue. This yields a sense in which love is always epistemically required: it is a perceptual sensitivity, and full possession of the perceptual sensitivities that are the other virtues also requires love. Love is not therefore required only on odd occasions in order to perceive a narrow set of features of the world, but it is necessary for all fully virtuous perception. Insofar as the virtues are unified, love allows one to perceive the world justly, courageously, and compassionately, and is therefore epistemically valuable in enabling all of these sensitivities. The Unique Significance of Love Love, in Murdoch’s view, is thus deeply intertwined with all other virtues. However, for Murdoch, love occupies a unique position among the virtues: it is love in particular that is identified as “a central concept in morals” (Murdoch 1970: 2). The thesis of the unity of the virtues alone does not provide reason to set love apart from any other virtue. It suggests that love is bound up with every other virtue but that the same is true of all virtues, since they are all interconnected. Nonetheless, in the aforementioned quotation Murdoch claims that deepening our concepts of the

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virtues introduces not only relationship between the virtues but also ‘hierarchy’. ‘Hierarchy’ suggests that some virtues are more fundamental than others and play a more significant unifying role within the realm of the virtues. In Murdoch’s scheme, love occupies a special position in this hierarchy: love is the form of all the virtues and has a particularly close connection to the Good itself. Murdoch’s suggestion is that love occupies a special position in the hierarchy of the virtues because the formal object of love is simply the real. On her account, love is a form of perception whose object is the real—that which exists outside of oneself and constrains one’s will: “love…is the discovery of reality” (Murdoch 1959: 52). Elsewhere, she discusses “the real which is the proper object of love” (Murdoch 1970: 68). As such, all virtues are forms of love, for all virtues involve perception of the real. All perception is perception of the real, and therefore all virtues are forms of love. One can attend lovingly to any object in the world, and for any object, loving attention will be morally and epistemically appropriate, allowing one to see it as it truly is and thus respond in a suitable way. According to Murdoch, the form or method of all the virtues is love: loving attention is necessary for all true vision. That is, all virtues require and involve true vision of the world, and for Murdoch, true vision means that they involve loving attention. On her account, love is therefore a necessary component of any virtue since it is the truthful vision that allows perception of the particular features of the world sensitivity to which constitutes the particular virtues. Since love is necessary for and an integral constituent of every other virtue, love has a special place within the hierarchy of the virtues, involving a unique contribution to all virtues. Murdoch thus states: “‘Good’: ‘Real’: ‘Love’. These words are closely connected” (Murdoch 1970: 42). On her account, love is a form of attention to and perception of the real, and the good is to be found in the deep configurations of the real. Love, for Murdoch, is a form of attention to particulars, and as such, it is the method of all the virtues. According to Murdoch, to be loving is to attend virtuously to the real, and loving attention to the real reveals entities that make moral demands on the perceiver.21 Murdoch’s justification of love’s epistemic and moral significance is therefore dependent on her account of love as the form of all virtues.

 Murdoch states, “Is there not nevertheless something about the conception of a refined love which is practically identical with goodness? Will not ‘Act lovingly’ translate ‘Act perfectly’, whereas ‘Act rationally’ will not?” (Murdoch 1970: 102). 21

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3.6   The Everyday Concept of Love: A Defense of Murdoch Murdoch thus presents an epistemically weighty account of love. She understands it as involving perception of the real and conceives of the loving perceiver as progressing toward a deepened understanding of the object. However, one might question whether what she is discussing is genuinely love. Setiya (2013), for instance, raises the question of whether Murdoch’s use of “love” is ‘quixotic’ and leaves this unanswered, and Schauber explicitly claims that “Murdoch’s official, cognitive conception of love is unfamiliar” (2001: 482). I shall address two particular skeptical questions that might arise in this regard: firstly, can this account of love allow for love’s affective dimension? Secondly, can this account explain love’s selectivity, and particularly the problem that evil objects of attention seem to pose? I shall suggest that Murdoch has the resources to respond to each of these concerns. Firstly, the affective dimension to love: one might worry that in understanding love as a perceptual sensitivity, Murdoch affirms its epistemic significance at the expense of its affective role. However, love’s epistemic role does not entail that it lacks an affective dimension. Indeed, Murdoch suggests that an account on which cognition or perception is severed from evaluation and affect is “both alien and implausible” (Murdoch 1970: 9).22 Identifying love with perception does not imply that it is not an emotion, nor that it is not affectively significant; rather, perception itself, or the knowledge thus gained, might be affective. Doring (2007) and de Sousa (1987, 2002), for instance, argue that emotions are perceptions of value, Roberts (1988) understands emotions as concern-based construals of value, and Nussbaum (2001) argues that emotions are forms of evaluative judgment. If emotions are understood on models such as these that unite the epistemic and the affective, love can be both perceptual and emotional. The phenomenal, affective, or ‘emotional’ character of love is not therefore denied by understanding love as involving knowledge; conceiving of love as an emotion is compatible with thinking of it as being a kind of perception.23  Indeed, Murdoch speaks of “obedience to reality as an exercise of love” (Murdoch 1970: 42), suggesting a close connection between love and action, a connection that plausibly goes via the affective. 23  Murdoch is not alone in offering an epistemically laden account of love: Jollimore (2011) also understands attending to the beloved in certain way as central to love. 22

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Murdoch’s conception of love as an epistemic state, then, is at least compatible with the ordinary conception of love as an affective state. She is, however, committed to the claim that one cannot truly love another without being in the concomitant epistemic state, whereas it might seem that the ordinary conception of love is only or primarily of an affective state. Although Murdoch’s account is consistent with the ordinary conception of love, one might therefore worry that it has a significantly different emphasis. In fact, however, we do ordinarily think of love as importantly involving knowledge. It seems plausible that if someone were utterly unmotivated to understand another, then however warm one’s feelings toward them, this would fall far short of love: they would be failing to relate to the intended object of love. Moreover, as Badhwar (2005) notes, “to the extent that others are deceived about us we fail to be the actual objects of their love” (Badhwar 2005: 60). Othello’s professed love for Iago, for instance, seems to be based upon too pervasive a misunderstanding of who Iago is to truly love him. Othello’s profoundly mistaken beliefs about Iago prevent him from knowing Iago and thus form a barrier preventing him from loving Iago. It is thus plausible that love at least has the aim of knowing or understanding the other, and a love that did not involve any insights about the beloved would seem questionable. Further, although the everyday conception of love is closely related to an affective state, there is reason to think that it is not reducible to this. Naar (2013), for instance, argues that considerations such as the historical nature of love, its ability to permeate one’s identity, and its persistence across both time and temporal disruptions suggest that it is not merely an occurrent affective state. As he notes, love is not a state that one could be in for only five minutes and is conceived of as persisting throughout disruptions such as depression or doubt. The ordinary concept of love is therefore not reducible to its affective dimension. Moreover, some significant elements of paradigmatic instances of interpersonal love are straightforwardly epistemic. As a friend or lover, one discerns features in another beyond those which would be available to an unloving observer, revealing a deeper knowledge of who the person is. Some prominent non-philosophical descriptions of love focus on this epistemic dimension to love. Take, for example, Jane Austen’s description of Darcy’s growing love for Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice:

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Mr Darcy had at first scarcely allowed her to be pretty; he had looked at her without admiration at the ball; and when they next met, he looked at her only to criticise. But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she had hardly a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes…he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and pleasing; and in spite of his asserting that her manners were not those of the fashionable world, he was caught by their easy playfulness.

In this passage, Austen reveals Darcy’s emerging love for Elizabeth by describing his increasing disposition to perceive her good qualities. The everyday conception of love does not therefore seem to identify it solely as an affective state, but to involve perception. Secondly, a critic might claim that the ordinary conception of love involves selectivity: we do not love all equally, and we feel justified in limiting loving relationships to particular people. For Murdoch, on the other hand, love is morally ‘commanded’ for every object of attention. She states that the virtuous agent, like the artist, sees their objects lovingly “whether they are sad, absurd, repulsive or even evil” (Murdoch 1970: 66). However, lovingly attending to all of reality does not imply that one must always express love in the same way, or that love needs to always take the same form. Loving one’s friends and one’s children, for example, will involve very different relationships. It seems plausible that the everyday conception of love covers a variety of phenomena, and that romantic and sexual love, for example, involve far more than the basic moral case. In these cases, the aspects of love that Murdoch identifies might be necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for love. Thus, that selectivity is part of the everyday conception of romantic love need not be in tension with loving attention being ‘commanded’ for every object of attention. Moreover, love’s selectivity is in part explained by the differing relationships that we have with others. The beloved’s attitude toward the lover plausibly affects the agent’s capacity to lovingly perceive them. The beloved’s behavior and attitudes can plausibly enable or make difficult loving perception of them. Certain ways of acting open one up to others, express one’s identity, and encourage engagement, while other ways of acting (indifference, taciturnity, aloofness) discourage the perceiver from attending lovingly. Although love is morally and epistemically necessary, there is therefore an explanation for the selective way most people love: the way another person acts can assist or hinder the lover in lovingly attending to them.

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Nonetheless, an objector might urge that this does not account for evil objects of attention, objects that seem unworthy of love. The idea that such evil objects morally and epistemically ought to be lovingly perceived seems to be far less obviously attractive than the idea that one’s friends and partners ought to be lovingly perceived; such objects do not seem to be lovable.24 One response to this is that as well as identifying love with knowledge of the real, Murdoch seems to identify ‘the real’ with ‘the Good’: “‘Good’: ‘Real’: ‘Love’. These words are closely connected” (Murdoch 1970: 42). Underlying Murdoch’s work runs a deep optimism in the reality and magnetic power of ‘the Good’, which might justify the idea that loving attention reveals objects that are ultimately worthy of love. However, I shall set aside this option, since it involves theoretical commitments which many would be hesitant to accept, and instead focus upon whether, if the real and the good are extricable, one might still conceive of love as knowledge of the real. Crucially, this objection depends upon an un-Murdochian model of love. Understanding love as a reliable sensitivity to the real does not entail that one must find the object of one’s love to be ‘lovable’. For instance, in the M and D example, Murdoch allows that attending lovingly to D might lead M to conclude that her daughter-in-law is indeed unworthy. In the same way that virtues such as justice might require negative appraisals and emotions, so too a properly loving response might include ultimately negative evaluations.25 Attending lovingly does not entail that one will ultimately conclude with a positive appraisal of the object of attention, but that the genuinely positive features of the object that are there to be seen will be increasingly fully perceived: the ultimate appraisal of the object will be just and truthful—but not necessarily positive. Indeed, the connection to virtues such as honesty and justice suggests that loving necessarily involves possible negative evaluations as well as positive ones. However, these will be situated within a vision of the other that does justice to the complex whole. It does not seem implausible that it is right to perceive even things that are overall unpleasant or evil in this way. 24  Chappell (2018) takes such objections to give reason to think that Murdoch does not, after all, identify love with knowledge or take love to be necessary for knowledge. 25  Wolf (2015) notes that to love, and to lovingly attend to another, need not entail finding them wholly lovable or admirable. Indeed, she suggests that the best kind of love involves a clear-eyed awareness of the beloved’s flaws.

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Finally, the idea that no one is an inappropriate object of love is far from peculiar to Murdoch. Perhaps the most famous ethical advice in the Gospels is found in Jesus’ injunction: “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44, NRSV), which is surely a case of morally commanded love for evil objects of attention.26 In this context, it seems that Murdoch’s account of love coheres with features of the familiar concept of it. If it is embedded in an ordinary conception of love that love for one’s enemies is possible, then Murdoch’s account seems like a natural development of the everyday conception of love, and a development that may shed new light upon it.

3.7   Conclusion I have argued that Murdoch’s claims about love’s epistemic role can thus be understood in relation to her conception of virtue. On her account, love is a virtue, and as such involves a perceptual sensitivity to objective features of reality. Moreover, Murdoch conceives of the virtues as unified, and of love as occupying a special position in the hierarchy of the virtues, which explains her contention that love is of unique moral and epistemic significance. However, Murdoch does not suggest that virtues attune one to features of reality that could be discerned by any neutral or impersonal perceiver; for her, there are objective features of reality that will be perceptible only from within a human moral schema. The loving agent’s conceptual resources themselves are transformed by loving attention. The apparent tension between love’s epistemic role and objectivity is thus resolved, since on Murdoch’s account love is personal but nonetheless involves an openness to the real. Although this account of love can seem surprising, it is nonetheless a rich and interesting account that is consistent with core components of the everyday conception of love.

References Badhwar, Neera K. 1996. The Limited Unity of Virtue. Noûs 30: 306–329. ———. 2005. Love. In The Oxford Handbook of Practical Ethics, ed. Hugh LaFollette, 42–69. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 26  This congruence between Murdochian love and Christian love is unsurprising given that Murdoch’s conception of loving attention was influenced by Simone Weil, a deeply religious thinker.

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Bagnoli, Carla. 2003. Respect and Loving Attention. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 33: 483–515. Broackes, Justin. 2012. Iris Murdoch, Philosopher. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chappell, Sophie Grace. 2018. Love and Knowledge in Murdoch. In Murdoch on Truth and Love, ed. Gary Browning, 89–108. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Clarke, Bridget. 2012. Iris Murdoch and the Prospects for Critical Moral Perception. In Iris Murdoch, Philosopher, ed. Justin Broackes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Sousa, Ronald. 1987. The Rationality of Emotion. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press. ———. 2002. Emotional Truth. Proceedings of the Aristotelean Society 76: 247–263. Doring, Sabine. 2007. Seeing What to Do: Affective Perception and Rational Motivation. Dialectica 61: 363–394. Hopwood, Mark. 2014. Love’s Work: Eros and Moral Agency. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. ———. 2017. “The Extremely Difficult Realisation That Something Other Than Oneself Is Real”: Iris Murdoch on Love and Moral Agency. European Journal of Philosophy 26: 477–501. Jollimore, Troy. 2011. Love’s Vision. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jordan, Jessy. 2014. Reconsidering Iris Murdoch’s Moral Realism. Journal of Value Inquiry 48: 371–385. Keller, Simon. 2004. Friendship and Belief. Philosophical Papers 33: 329–351. McDowell, John. 1979. Virtue and Reason. The Monist 62: 331–350. ———. 1998. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press. ———. 2011. Colors as Secondary Qualities. In The Possibility of Philosophical Understanding, ed. Wai-Hung Wong, Jason Bridges, and Niko Kolodny, 217–231. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McLean, Mark. 2000. On Muffling Murdoch. Ratio 13: 191–198. Mulhall, Stephen. 2000. Misplacing Freedom, Displacing the Imagination: Cavell and Murdoch on the Fact/Value Distinction. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 47: 255–277. Murdoch, Iris. 1956. Vision and Choice in Morality. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 30: 32–46. ———. 1959. The Sublime and the Good. Chicago Review 13: 42–55. ———. 1970. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge & K. Paul. ———. 1992. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Chatto & Windus. Naar, Hichem. 2013. A Dispositional Theory of Love. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 94: 342–357. Nussbaum, Martha. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of the Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Roberts, Robert C. 1988. What an emotion is: A sketch. Philosophical Review 97: 183–209. Schauber, Nancy. 2001. Murdoch’s Morality: Vision, Will, and Rules. The Journal of Value Inquiry 35: 477–491. Setiya, Kieran. 2013. Murdoch on the Sovereignty of Good. Philosophers Imprint 13: 1–21. Sreenivasan, Gopal. 2009. Disunity of Virtue. The Journal of Ethics 13: 195–212. Stroud, Sarah. 2006. Epistemic Partiality in Friendship. Ethics 116: 498–524. Toner, Christopher. 2014. The Full Unity of the Virtues. The Journal of Ethics 18: 207–227. Velleman, James David. 1999. Love as a Moral Emotion. Ethics 109: 338–374. Weil, Simone. 1956. The Notebooks of Simone Weil, trans. Arthur Wills. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Williams, Bernard. 1978. Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1981. Persons, Character and Morality. In Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980, 1–19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolf, Susan. 2007. Moral Psychology and the Unity of the Virtues. Ratio 20: 145–167. ———. 2015. The Variety of Values. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 4

‘Love’ as a Practice: Looking at Real People Lotte Spreeuwenberg

4.1   An Ameliorative Project Recent philosophical discussions about love often focus on reasons to love a particular person. Some philosophers argue that we do not have reasons to love (Frankfurt 2009; Smuts 2013; Zangwill 2013), but rather that our love for that particular person gives us reasons. Harry Frankfurt argues that what we love is important to us just because we love it. Others argue that we do have reasons to love the particular people we love, but disagree on what these reasons consist in. For example, the reason for love is the properties of the object of our love (Abramson and Leite 2011; Jollimore 2011; Keller 2000), such as being funny, or having beautiful eyes, or our relationship with this person (Kolodny 2003). In these recent discussions philosophers of love seem to primarily focus on ‘reasons to love person X’. But what about ‘reasons to love, period’? Focusing on why we love and what love is in general, enables us to look at what we find meaningful in love, instead of what we find valuable in the beloved. Focusing on the lover instead of the beloved could improve the way we love in general, improving our relationships with all those

L. Spreeuwenberg (*) Centre for Ethics, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Cushing (ed.), New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72324-8_4

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particular X’s. Focusing on the loving agent could help answer questions such as ‘what does it mean to love?’ and ‘how can we love better?’. Apart from describing what love is, one could independently argue about what kind of love would be more or less valuable. We could categorize better and worse forms of love. In this chapter this normative dimension of the concept ‘love’ is considered. Such a project is not trying to formulate the description of ‘love’, but it is focusing on what would be better or worse forms of loving. Furthermore, this chapter is what Sally Haslanger has called an ‘ameliorative’ project (Haslanger 2012). Such a project involves trying to formulate a concept that best suits the point of having such a term. What is the purpose of talking about love? An ameliorative project requires actively making decisions about what to mean when using it. How can we change the world around us for the better and improve how we use the concept ‘love’? In this sense, ameliorative projects can be important for social progress. What use of the word ‘love’ could improve the way we love, and how could it impact society? ‘All about love’ by bell hooks is such an ameliorative project about love. Using personal anecdotes and psychological and philosophical ideas, she criticizes the way in which ‘love’ is used in today’s society—which is, according to her, ‘without much meaning’, for example, when referring to how much we like our favorite food, color, or sports—and instead argues that if we all came to the agreement that ‘love’ is a verb rather than a noun, then we would all be happier (hooks 2001: 4). hooks believes love is more of an interactive process and clarifies why society needs to adopt this use of the word love. What should this particular ‘verb’ consist in? In line with hooks I argue that we would all love better if we think of love as a verb: love as an activity of attending to one another. Love as an ongoing practice, a process. I turn to two famous contemporary analytic philosophers, who have argued for different but related accounts of love. By comparing David Velleman’s and Iris Murdoch’s account of love I argue that Velleman’s account is not suitable for the ameliorative project, while Murdoch’s account enables us to be better lovers. I argue that better love consists of an activity of loving, instead of a passive evaluation. While love can be understood in many ways, at least one aspect of it is captured in the slogan: ‘love’ is a verb. This slogan captures the idea that loving is an activity and furthermore a specific activity: loving means engaging in an ongoing practice of loving attention, a process that requires continuous work. I will argue that Murdochian love is not only valuable for philosophers or people who are concerned

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with being morally good—which is Murdoch’s focus—but also particularly valuable to ordinary lovers, to people who want meaningful loving relationships.

4.2   Love, Value, and Looking In ‘Love as a Moral Emotion’, Velleman attempts to assemble elements of both Murdoch and Kant into an account of love as a moral emotion (Velleman 1999). This famous contemporary account of love is meant to address and combat Frankfurt’s position: love is not a response to reasons but is in fact the basis of all reasons. On Frankfurt’s account, the lover cares for the beloved, desires their well-being, and, in doing so, comes to confer value upon the beloved. Against this bestowal view of love, Velleman argues for the appraisal view of love inspired by Iris Murdoch. Murdoch, Kant, and Velleman all allow that value may be discerned or figuratively seen, as Tony Milligan has observed in his analysis of Velleman’s use of Murdoch’s account of love (2013: 113). Velleman adopts Murdoch’s idea that this value may be seen by ‘really looking’ (Velleman 1999: 343). Murdoch’s account of love and Kant’s account of respect are taken by Velleman to be complementary ways in which we recognize the inherent value of persons. Velleman takes different features from both philosophers’ work and is not alone in placing Murdoch’s ideas within a Kantian perspective.1 Velleman, being a Kantian, argues that our value, our dignity as persons, consists in our rational nature. One important way in which we exercise our rational nature is to respond with respect to the dignity of other persons. We are aware of the incomparable value in a person as a rational being, and this awareness arrests our motives of self-interest and thereby prevents us from treating him as a means to our ends. This is what Velleman (and Kantians in general) call respect. Velleman argues that love is similarly a response to the dignity of persons, and as such it is the dignity of the object that justifies love. Velleman suggests that love, like respect, is an appreciation for the capacity to be “actuated by reasons” (p. 365), which means a capacity for “appreciating the value of ends, including

1  Although Murdoch regarded herself a Platonist, many philosophers have argued that her ideas are compatible with Kantian ideas or have used her ideas within Kantian perspectives (cf. Bagnoli 2003; Grenberg 2014; Merritt 2017; and Milligan 2013).

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self-existent ends such as persons”. Velleman argues: “I find it plausible to say that what we respond to, in loving people, is their capacity to love” (p. 365). For Velleman, love and respect are responses to the same value, but they are different kinds of responses. Love arrests not our self-love, like respect does, but rather our emotional self-protection. Love disarms our emotional defenses, making us vulnerable, by responding to someone’s dignity (p. 361). Velleman claims that: Many of our defenses against being emotionally affected by another person are ways of not seeing what is most affecting about him. This contrived blindness to the other person is among the defenses that are lifted by love, with the result that we really look at him, perhaps for the first time, and respond emotionally in a way that’s indicative of having really seen him. (1999: 361)

There is a clear parallel with Murdoch here. Velleman’s view of love as arresting our self-protective egocentricity helps to explain why love is an exercise in really looking, precisely as Murdoch claims. Velleman describes someone having “stopped loving his wife” as having “stopped really looking or listening” (p.  373). His account is clearly inspired by Murdoch, who claims that to love is to redirect our attention outside ourselves, to learn to perceive the truth about the world and see what there is outside oneself (1971) and that love is an opening up in the sense that it is “the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real” (1999: 215). So Velleman’s account of love seems to be broadly Murdochian, but by combining Murdoch’s and Kant’s theories he has worked himself into an awkward position. His account of love is detached in a way that Murdoch’s is not.2 It involves a certain abstraction of people that Murdoch specifically avoids. While Murdoch argues that we should look at the unique and particular (1971), Velleman’s account tells us that what we love is essentially a person’s dignity, something that all rational beings share. On Velleman’s account, this is sufficient to speak of love. The detachedness of Velleman’s account of love becomes especially clear when he explains his notion of ‘selectivity’. Since for Velleman love and respect are different rational responses to the same value, he should 2

 Possibly Kant’s account of love is also not as detached as Velleman’s (Milligan 2013).

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have an explanation for why the number of people we respect generally outweighs the number of people we love. Velleman is fully aware of this problem and argues that we cannot respond with love to the dignity of every person we meet, nor are we required to. For Velleman, love is the optional maximal response to others’ dignity, while respect is the required minimum. Hence, he argues for the selectivity of love. With this concept Velleman tries to account for personal, but not partial, love. Selectivity of love means that a contingent fit takes place between the way some people behaviorally express their dignity as persons and the way we happen to respond to those expressions by becoming emotionally vulnerable to them. The right sort of fit makes someone lovable by us (1999, p. 372), and our responding with love is a matter of our ‘really seeing’ the other in a way that we fail to do with others who do not fit us this way. It is important to note that by ‘lovable’ Velleman does not mean ‘worthy of love’. Instead, he means something like ‘able to be loved’. Whether someone is lovable depends on how well his value as a person is expressed or symbolized for us by his empirical persona. Someone’s persona may not speak very clearly of his value as a person, or may not speak in ways that are clear to us. (1999: 372)

Velleman’s point is that we have many reasons for being selective in love, without having to find differences of worth among possible love objects. The people whom we do not happen to love may be just as eligible for love as our own children, spouses, parents, and intimate friends, he argues. “In merely respecting rather than loving these people, we do not assess them as lower in value. Rather, we feel one emotion rather than another in appreciation of their value. Loving some but not others entails valuing them differently but not attributing different values to them, or even comparing them at all” (1999: 372). This explanation of love generates a few problems. Firstly, it seems to be an unrealistic illustration of what love is, for it puts little responsibility on the lover. It might be true that recognizing another’s dignity can take some effort: we have to at least be willing to disarm our emotional defenses in order for this to happen. However, let’s keep the ameliorative project in mind. Taking love to be something so detached that we merely have to recognize the dignity of a person, and so contingent that we have little responsibility concerning whom we love and connect with, will not make us better lovers—or so I will argue in the following sections. Other uses of

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the word ‘love’ are better suited to improve the way we love and to enable societal change. We should play a bigger part in loving each other. Velleman puts too much emphasis on both the contingent fit—and this being dependent on the way other people behaviorally express themselves—and the response to a value that all human beings share. We would be better lovers when love is more than contingent: love requires actively looking, engaging in an ongoing practice. Furthermore, loving goes beyond seeing someone’s dignity; we are not finished with practicing love once we have recognized a value that all human beings share. Velleman’s piece has been extensively discussed, and other problems have been addressed by, for example, Edward Harcourt (2009) or Elijah Millgram (2004). I will shortly address a solution to one of these previously stated problems, because it unintentionally reveals the need for an account of love as a more active engagement, seeing the particularities of our beloveds. One problem is that Velleman cannot explain love’s personal character: if love is justified by a property that all rational people share, it seems to follow that it cannot matter which rational being one loves, and this seems contrary to another expectation we have about love—that it involves focus on the particularity of the loved individual (Lopez-Cantero, manuscript). By reformulating Velleman’s account of love, Pilar Lopez-­ Cantero accounts for the personal character of love by (1) explaining Velleman’s selectivity as narrative fit and (2) reformulating what is understood as ‘rational nature’ and ‘empirical persona’. Although this reinterpretation describes love in a way that is, like Velleman’s, a contingent, somewhat passive, emotion, it is useful for the ameliorative project here. Lopez-Cantero’s reformulation of Velleman’s account could be used as a clear example of why we need an account of love as an activity. She argues that it is our narrative, and not, as Velleman argues, our empirical persona, that fits with some and not with others. Lopez-Cantero suggests that the incomparable value of another is directly perceived through their personal narrative, which is a direct product of the agent: the narrator. The concepts ‘narrator’ and ‘personal narrative’ play an equivalent role in LopezCantero’s theory to ‘rational nature’ and ‘empirical persona’ in Velleman’s theory. Since the lover has her own narrative agency which aims at intelligibility, some narratives will be particularly meaningful to her, and in that case there will be a narrative fit with the beloved. In this reinterpretation, what Velleman calls selectivity is explained by reference to an actual promise of meaning for the lover, instead of a contingent fit between the more abstract ‘empirical persona’. If ‘empirical persona’ is reformulated in terms

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of a narrative fit, the difference between love and respect on these accounts also becomes clearer.3 Respecting people is valuing human dignity, something which every human being shares. According to Velleman, respect and love share the same final objects, but Lopez-Cantero’s reformulation of Velleman’s selectivity makes clear that this final object is only accessed via something that is different in everyone—but is a direct product of that final object. We value personal agency (as the equivalent of rational nature in Velleman’s account), but love happens by evaluation of its product: personal narrative. This evaluation will differ since every individual’s personal narrative is unique. Because love and respect are different evaluation processes, it is possible to respect someone whom we do not love, argues Lopez-Cantero.

4.3   Love as Passivity: Unrealistic Images and Fantasies How does ‘narrative fit’ show the need for love as an activity? I submit that Velleman’s and Lopez-Cantero’s depictions of what it means to love are problematic: according to them, if we do not have a fit with an individual, it is because his or her empirical persona expresses their dignity poorly to us. Their view is too passive on the side of the lover and ignores some responsibility on the part of the loving agent. Lopez-Cantero’s account of love as a narrative fit does not do away with this passive evaluation, because our narratives on her account seem to be just contingently fitting. However, the idea of fitting narratives enables us to paint a better picture of what love is all about. Love is often nothing like a contingent fit, whether that is between empirical persona or narratives. Without ruling out that a contingent fit could be part of love, such a fit might not be enough to be (or remain) a good lover. Love does not come easily, for loving involves hard work! Consider the love between Dante and Beatrice (famous for being Dante’s muse). Dante was helplessly in love with Beatrice, but during his life they only met a few times and only twice they had the shortest conversation of greeting each other (Alighieri 1294). His deep love for Beatrice became his reason to write poetry. More crucially, it became his reason to be alive. In Dante’s poems, Beatrice appears before him as a ghostly 3  Which is considered a different problem with Velleman’s account, pointed out by Edward Harcourt (2009).

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shadow, a half-goddess. She functions as a muse, watches over him and guides him, gives him helpful instructions, or criticizes him. While Beatrice is enormously valuable to Dante, his ideas of her merely consist in projection, prompted by his own desires and feelings. He closes his eyes to the real Beatrice, while focusing on his fantasy of her. Could love not be more valuable—especially if we were Beatrice—than Dante’s fantasy? Unfortunately we cannot ask her, since her voice only can be heard in that particular version Dante made of her: a half-goddess, merely functioning for Dante’s sake. However, we can ask ourselves and the people around us. Dante and Beatrice’s love story is obviously a historic example, and it was a picture of love painted a long time ago. But we would consider a relationship based on unrealistic images of the beloved non-ideal today, too. In romantic relationships, we are often blinded by being hopelessly infatuated, so that numerous fantasies about our beloved surface, flooding more uncomfortable realities. I don’t want to claim that infatuation is not valuable at all, but I think that most of us would deem a relationship based on unrealistic fantasies, or these fantasies being the core of the relationship throughout time, not the most valuable, meaningful kind of love for both (or more) people involved. Surely the same goes for friendship: if we truly want to connect, we better open ourselves to the reality of our friends. Poet and feminist Adrienne Rich puts it beautifully when she writes: An honorable human relationship—that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”—is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other. It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-­ delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity. It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us. (Rich 1995: 111)

In an honorable human relationship, two people have the right to use the word love, writes Rich. And loving is not such an easy task to take up: it is ‘the hard way’. And this does not solely apply to romantic or personal love; it is applicable to societal issues as well. There are obstacles for looking at the reality around us: physically, when we push particular groups or people out of our sight (e.g. literally putting away refugees), and psychologically, when we are focusing too much on ourselves, our needs and our desires. When groups or human beings don’t understand, appreciate, or

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accept each other, they are often keeping each other—or rather, one is keeping the other—at a distance: we don’t really want to see the other. Or putting it differently, we don’t really want to see each other’s reality, because we are too comfortable with our own. Dante loves ‘the fantasy Beatrice’—he does not love Beatrice. For the real Beatrice, Dante is not a great lover, at all. Suppose that Dante has recognized Beatrice’s ‘incomparable value as a human being’. Furthermore, to Dante, their empirical personas are contingently fitting. Dante doesn’t have to do anything for this love to emerge: it just happens. He saw her and boom, love was in the air. Such a feeling or happening has been described many times as love (just think of any romantic comedy or pick any love song), but that doesn’t mean this is the type of love or loving that is particularly meaningful to us. For Beatrice, there is not much love to it. In Lopez-Cantero’s account, ‘empirical persona’ makes way for ‘narrative fit’, but this is still a detached form of love. The fact that their ‘fit’ happens contingently means that neither Dante nor Beatrice had any part in it and bear no responsibility whatsoever. The bigger problem is that because of this lack of agency, Dante is not really attending to Beatrice, his desires and needs shaping a self-serving fantastical image of her. Velleman and Lopez-Cantero could argue that Dante’s love does not count as love on their accounts: Dante is not really valuing Beatrice’s dignity, he just thinks he is; or Dante and Beatrice’s narratives don’t really fit, Dante just thinks they do. Dante thinks he’s in love, but on their account he is not. But even if this were true, just think of the sort of love Velleman does have in mind and whether this would make us better lovers. On Velleman’s account responsibility on the part of the lover is missing. In one of his examples he states: “I think that love naturally arises […]” (1999: 361). Such a passive attitude in love is an obstacle for really looking at each other. Will Dante ever see the real Beatrice? Velleman’s account of love is descriptive, not normative, and here our philosophical projects differ. However, even of descriptive projects we can ask what they contribute to the concept in the real world. What do we want ‘loving’ to mean? The ameliorative project requires actively making decisions about what to mean when using ‘love’. How can we change the world around us for the better and improve how we use the concept? What use of the word ‘love’ could improve the way we love, and how could it impact society? Velleman’s account of love does not suffice: not its contingency, not its passivity. bell hooks is right when she states that while

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the word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, we would all love better if we used it as a verb (2001: 4). Love is particularly meaningful to us when we talk about it in terms of an attitude that one can take up: an ongoing practice or process we can actively engage in. We better use ‘love’ as a verb and it needs an active object.

4.4   Love as an Ongoing Practice: Steering Away from the Ego Let’s view the example of Dante and Beatrice from a Murdochian view of love. For Murdoch, loving consists in looking beyond the ego, focusing our attention on the particular and the unique. She holds that to love is to redirect our attention, to learn to perceive the truth about the world, and to see what there is outside one (1971). Constantly attending to our needs, our desires, and our thoughts alters our perspective on what the world is actually like and blinds us to the goods around us. Murdoch states that “in the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego” (1971, p. 51) and love, as focused attention, is steering away from the ego. We are often so much focused on ourselves, our desires and needs, that we are blind to the things and people around us. However, we do want to truly connect. We appreciate it when the people around us are able to look beyond the limits of their own world and see us for what we actually are. We want to be truly seen, or at least we don’t want our lover’s needs or desires constantly trumping our experiences, when we are in (any) relationship. We should therefore think of love as actively attending: a process in which we attend lovingly to our beloveds with an open gaze. This effort does not necessarily require behavioral ‘proof’ that is visible to others. Consider this famous passage from Iris Murdoch in The Sovereignty of Good: A mother (M) feels hostility to her daughter-in-law (D). M finds D quite a good-hearted girl, but while not exactly common yet certainly unpolished and lacking in dignity and refinement. D is inclined to be pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile. M does not like D’s accent or the way D dresses. M feels that her son has married beneath him. […] Time passes, and it could be that M settles down with a hardened sense of grievance and a fixed picture of D […]. However, the M of the example is an intelligent and well-intentioned person, capable of self-criticism, capable of giving careful and just attention

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to an object which confronts her. M tells herself: ‘[…] let me look again.’ Here I assume that M observes D or at least reflects deliberately about D, until gradually her vision of D alters. […] the change is not in D’s behavior but in M’s mind. D is discovered to be not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous, not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully youthful, and so on. (1971: 16)

The example shows that M looks at D, she attends to D and focuses her attention. She is trying to see D in a way that goes beyond her own projections, in a way that is not guided by her ego. It takes place in the inner life, in M’s mind, but nevertheless is an action: she engages in the practice of focusing her attention on D. It is unlikely that M would come to value D in new ways unless she made the effort to look at her with an open gaze. It is in this sense that love is a realization, an opening up in the sense that it is “the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real” (1999: 215). When we are focused on our own desires and needs, we fall prey to the dangers of the ego: we make up fantasies in our minds. Love is meaningful to us when we are able to steer away from our ego and perceive the particularity and uniqueness of a person, their reality. On Velleman’s account of love, Dante is able to entertain self-serving fantasies of Beatrice. Love here is something contingent, and it suffices to value dignity to speak of love. However, Murdoch’s theory of love is a less detached version of the concept, since we must adapt our concepts to the uniqueness of the particular people we meet. Dante should engage in the practice of loving attention, looking at Beatrice with an open gaze, and consequently would see more of the real Beatrice. What would have happened if Dante had engaged in this practice? If he hadn’t been blinded by his own desires and needs? If he had not let his ego guide him, but had actively looked at Beatrice? Actively looked at her, opening up in the sense that he had ‘the extremely difficult realization’ that Beatrice, someone other than himself, someone outside his art, his emotions, and his intellect, was real. Our desires and fantasies tend to make us blind to the things around us; make everything around us fit the concepts that we already have or believe to be true. But when we focus on the particular and the unique, we can come to know new concepts and new realities, and it is more likely that we won’t get stuck in our own self-serving worlds. Murdoch is trying to tell us that it is not love that is blind, but our ego.

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4.5   Real People Versus Fantasies Why is seeing each other’s reality so particularly valuable? Being fed up with fantasies about certain persons or groups is a recurring theme in fighting for equality. With such a fight for equality, often a call for attention comes along: look at us, hear us, see our (particular) truth. This call for attention urges its addressees to attend to the reality of a certain group, instead of projecting fantasies onto that group, fueled by the blindness and egos of an oppressive group or society. Some of the most important feminist works discuss the cultural myths that have been around—or are still very much alive—about the reality of women. In fact, the very notion of mysticism is in titles of some of the most famous feminist works of the past century. With The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan challenged the widely shared belief in the 1950s that “fulfillment as a woman had only one definition for American women after 1949—the housewife-mother” (1963). The phrase ‘feminine mystique’ was created by Friedan to show the assumptions that women would be fulfilled from their housework, marriage, sexual lives, and children. It was said that women, who were actually feminine, should not have wanted work, get an education, or have political opinions. By portraying that image as mystique, Friedan showed the reality of many of these women, namely, that they were dreadfully unhappy. In turn, Friedan was criticized for being blind to the experiences of women other than those belonging to the white middle class. bell hooks labeled Friedan’s project narcissistic and self-indulgent and writes in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center: “She did not speak of the needs of women without men, without children, without homes. She ignored the existence of all non-white women and poor white women” (2000). Another book that specifically talks about the harmfulness of blindness and fantasies is The Beauty Myth, in which Naomi Wolf (1991) gives us a similar argument when describing societies’ fantasies of female beauty. Although she wrote the book in the early nineties, the argument never ceased to be relevant. The pressure that many women feel to adhere to unrealistic social norms of physical beauty is still leading to unhealthy behavior and an obsession with the female appearance for both sexes, today. Many men (and women) have unrealistic beliefs about the physical female beauty, the physical appearances of real human beings. Fantasies, such as ‘women do not grow body hair’, ‘hair is smooth and straight and certainly not Afro-textured’, or ‘all women are hourglass shaped’, create detachment between real people. Firstly, fantasy obstructs

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a connection because unrealistic beliefs make for unrealistic expectations which could lead to disappointment. Secondly, it obstructs a connection because many are trapped in the conflict between expectation and reality, wanting to live up to expectations and thus constantly engage in self-­ masking or self-destructive behavior—in Wolf’s example: shaving, waxing, lasering, dyeing, relaxing,4 a thirty-something-step beauty routine, and dieting obsessively. Now one might try to point out the irrelevance of my argument by arguing that one does not want to love real human beings or that loving fantasies is particularly valuable. Some might be particularly happy living inside their fantasies, without harsh reality ruining self-serving dreams. Furthermore, it takes some effort to actually look at others’ reality, especially from a privileged position in which the world is built for your comfort. Secretly, we might not want to learn new concepts. It is not my intention to make the moral case that love should be love only between real human beings and that it is, in any case, wrong to love fantasies. The argument here is about better lovers and how we can improve how we use the concept ‘love’. If we want love to be something meaningful between real human beings, as opposed to self-serving fantasies, we need to take up the activity of focusing our attention outside ourselves. Above all, privileged persons have all the more reason to engage in an activity of loving attention if they want to be better lovers. The problem often is, however, that until privileged people (myself included in many respects, as a white, educated, non-disabled person) are really looking, we are not aware that we are so privileged, somewhat stuck in our own realities. There is a positive argument in favor of the role of fantasies, too. Lisa Bortolotti argues that optimistically biased beliefs can help us attain our goals, based on literature on positive illusions in the perception of romantic partners (2018). Bortolotti argues that optimistic beliefs lead to goal attainment by sustaining our motivation to act after we experience setbacks or when some of our cherished goals are under threat. Multiple positive illusions could benefit our relationships in this way. One could have optimism bias underestimating the likelihood of getting a divorce even when we are well-informed about the high divorce rates in this society (Baker and Emery 1993; Fowers et al. 2001). Such a bias may be supported by other positive illusions about the relationship: the relationship 4  Referring to the chemically straightening of tight curly (e.g. Afro-textured) hair, not to relaxing as calming or unwinding activity.

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superiority bias occurs when we rate our relationship as better than most, while we experience the love-is-blind illusion when we are blind to our romantic partners’ faults and perceive our partners as better than average in a number of domains, including intelligence and attractiveness (Buunk and van den Eijnden 1997; Murray et al. 1996a, b; Rusbult et al. 2000). We tend to idealize our partners’ qualities, and this could be beneficial for the relationship we have with them, Bortolotti argues. The idealization of romantic partners helps us continue to value the relationship as something worth working on and is linked to more satisfying and more stable relationships in both the short and the long term. Some of the positive effects Bortolotti mentions seem plausible, such as having a strong sense of security and confidence in a relationship as a result of partner idealization, or reinterpreting our partners’ weaknesses as strengths. But I suggest that, when engaging in the ameliorative project, Bortolotti’s approach is too one-sided, much like Velleman’s. While Velleman focuses too much on the beloved and how they express themselves, Bortolotti focuses too much on the lover. She is focusing on the optimistic agent and whether optimistic beliefs are good or bad for this particular agent. Since we are focusing on being better lovers, there is much more to consider here. Loving people involves two (or more) people: at least a lover and a beloved (this is even true of unrequited love, or loving very young children). Bortolotti’s one-sided approach is probably due to focusing on the effects of optimistic beliefs on psychological health: whether true or false beliefs lead to psychological well-being or distress, that is, psychological well-being or distress for the agent having the beliefs. Bortolotti argues: “the belief that the partners share features with us and with our ideal partners sustains our motivation to solve the problems our relationship may be facing” (2018: 530). That might be true, but if we want to discuss better love, we need a more nuanced approach. Or rather, we need to add another standpoint. Bortolotti’s approach is much like investigating whether Dante’s illusions of Beatrice are healthy for Dante’s psychological well-being, or have positive effects for his take on their relationship (whatever relationship that might be). But those questions should make us at least a bit uncomfortable, knowing there was another person involved. It feels as if we’re asking the wrong questions—or rather, asking not enough questions. What about Beatrice? What about her experiences, beliefs, and psychological well-being?

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Bortolotti continues: “In order for us to be successful agents in the face of constant challenges, we need to believe that we can change things for the better, and in order to do that we need to have a sense of competence, control, and efficacy that propels us forward, a sense that our goals are indeed desirable and attainable” (2018: 531). While this is not something I want to argue against, I think that to ‘change things for the better’ we should at least look at everyone involved, unless we only want to change things for the better for no one but ourselves. Such a project would surely not be what most people have in mind thinking about being better lovers. When one tries to answer those missing questions, one would see that, while the positive illusions might be beneficial for Dante, they are probably not that beneficial for Beatrice. Dante’s positive illusions paint such an unrealistic picture of Beatrice that it silences her real self. Beatrice has no voice: we don’t know who she is, what she experiences, or what she wants. Focusing too much on the beneficial consequences of positive illusions for the lover would neglect the process of attending to the beloved. Bortolotti argues, by focusing on the loving agent, that positive illusions could make for stable relationships by giving the agent the motivation to work for that relationship. Bortolotti’s account thus seems to be more about stable relationships than about being better lovers. And while those could influence each other, it is certainly possible to have a stable relationship without being good lovers, for example, a very oppressive, but stable, relationship. Besides a too narrow focus, Bortolotti mentions one particular effect of optimistic beliefs that could turn out as not just meaningless love, but harmful for the beloved. The effect furthermore shows the need for love as actively attending to real people. Sandra Murray and colleagues discuss an effect of partner idealization that is labeled as reflective appraisals: when partners are idealized, they come to see themselves as we see them, and live up to our high standards (Murray et al. 1996b). Based on this view, Bortolotti argues that positive illusions can bring success in romantic relationships not because perceptions of the romantic partners are realistic, but because they have a positive effect on our behavior in the relationship and support us in the pursuit of our relationship-related goals when problems emerge (2018: 527). “Intimates can actually turn self-perceived frogs into the princes or princesses they perceive them to be” (Murray et  al. 1996b: 1158). But it seems to depend heavily on the nature of the illusion whether such a process of adapting to others’ expectations is necessarily a good thing. If men having the illusions of thin, hourglass-shaped, hairless

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women leads to women living up to those expectations, adapting to your lover’s illusions could be quite harmful (see the passage about The Beauty Myth above). Murray et al. found that, over time, the idealized evaluations became more realistic, not because people experienced disappointment and lowered their expectations accordingly, but because partners rose up to the challenge and exhibited the qualities that were initially attributed to them. As a result of reflective appraisals, the gap between idealization and reality shrinks. But this is not necessarily a good thing, considering the particular aforementioned example of self-masking or self-destructing behavior, only to live up to expectations. Furthermore, the mechanism of illusions turning into beauty standards seems to be about non-moral ideals,5 but what about illusions about someone’s moral character? Reflective appraisals could turn out great when we expect someone to be good: what could be wrong with someone trying to live up to expectations concerning moral character? Here, again, it seems to depend heavily on the nature of the illusion whether the process of adapting to others’ expectations could be harmful. Depending on the society we live in, there are particular expectations of, for example, a ‘good woman’. While the dominant expectations fortunately no longer include role patterns of wives cooking and husbands breadwinning, many other unequal patterns and expectations are still at play. Kate Manne points out roles and standards of Western society, in which women are considered moral givers (2017). A ‘good girl’ gives, doesn’t ask for anything, is expected to be grateful, owes things to others as opposed to being entitled to something—especially ‘moral goods’, such as attention, care, sympathy, respect, and admiration. Manne further explains that we must understand misogyny as a characteristic of such social environments, in which women are susceptible to hostility due to the maintenance of these expectations: women are considered ungrateful, sour, aggressive, or worse when they don’t live up to these expectations. If these kinds of idealized evaluations become more realistic because partners rise up to the challenge and exhibit the qualities that are attributed to them, reflective appraisal is (in this case) a harmful dynamic—a power play by which suppressed groups continue to be suppressed by ongoing fantasies of the oppressor.

5  Although Heather Widdows makes a compelling case for beauty being considered an ethical ideal in her book Perfect me (2018).

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This dynamic could be harmful for men, too: it is not too hard to come up with examples of harmful fantasies that concern men: ‘men never cry’, ‘men are sexual predators’. Moreover, it is not solely a gender issue, but something that concerns all forms of inequality, stereotypes, and social patterns: ‘black women are hypersexual’, ‘black men are dangerous’, and so on. A meaningful connection in which ‘two people have the right to use the word love’, as Rich put it, should look past stereotypes, social patterns, and self-serving fantasies. Only by attending to the particular and unique around us, we can let go of our self-serving worlds. Murdoch herself did not advocate political use of loving attention. However, loving attention would make us better lovers in general and enable us to live better with the real people around us. Fantasies are only given room to grow when we keep someone (or a certain group) out of our sight or at an emotional distance. Velleman would probably not argue that loving fantasies is particularly valuable, but his account of love is not equipped to prevent or combat idealized fantasies. Loving, as both described by Murdoch and argued for here, focuses on eliminating these fantasies—adapting our concepts to the uniqueness of the different people we meet, by looking at the world around us. Boxes, categorizations, and stereotypes make way for real people.

4.6   The Ongoing Practice: Getting to Know Versus Knowledge I have discussed several distinctions between Velleman’s and Murdoch’s accounts of love and argued that a Murdochian kind of loving is better suited for the ameliorative project. Love should be more than contingent and requires actively looking. Furthermore, loving should go beyond seeing another’s dignity: it is precisely looking at the particular and unique that helps us move away from our ego, a practice we need to escape self-­ serving fantasies and to see the reality of others. There is another important aspect to this. To love better is to engage in an ongoing practice. We are successful when we engage in this activity, not when we reach a particular goal such as a contingent fit or valuing a person’s dignity. Love is a process, a progressive attempt. Really looking at others is not easy. It is ‘the hard way’, writes Rich. Are we ever able to see someone’s truth? Are we not always bound by the concepts we have and

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therefore never able to really see someone? And if so, what is ‘better love’ exactly aiming at? What if Dante actively engages in an activity of focused loving attention but still fails to see some aspects of Beatrice’s truth? And how well do we have to know each other to speak about love?6 Seeing our loved one’s reality must not be mistaken for knowing everything about them or even understanding them. ‘Better love’ as it is argued for here, does not entail that we know or need to know every detail about our beloved. Carla Bagnoli (2018) rightly points out that sometimes understanding might be too violent a modality of relating to others, “like poking into their private reality, rather than simply accepting their alterity and respecting their opacity” (p.  82). Love does not aim at completely understanding others. Love has no ‘end goal’, which would entail particular knowledge about the beloved. Loving, on this account, indeed does not aim, but is the process of getting to know others. It is an ongoing practice, being perceptive of others as they are. Murdoch knew perfectly well that we are never really able to see reality successfully. We can only look through our own eyes, with our own concepts, culture, and history. Perception is therefore a restricted capacity: what we see depends on what particular concepts we have, and if we don’t have (or acquire) the right conceptual resources, we might be forever blind to some particular parts of the truth. It might be impossible for Dante to know Beatrice’s reality. For example, some of her experiences will always remain hidden to Dante to a certain extent: he will never know what it feels like to give birth. If we cannot succeed in seeing truth, why would being open to this truth be a better way of loving? With the example of M and D Murdoch wanted to imagine a case in which the reader could feel approval of M’s change of view. She also admits (the example is especially designed that way) that in real life it might be very hard to decide whether M’s ultimate judgment of D in the example is morally appropriate or not (Murdoch 1971: 17). The reader doesn’t know D, and therefore cannot evaluate whether D is really a good-hearted girl, or whether M’s loving attention leads M either to see truth or just to see more fantasies. There is not enough space here to elaborate extensively on Murdoch’s view of morality or her meta-ethical perspective. But what happens in the example of M is important. It is used to show that moral activity can happen in the inner life, and Murdoch positions herself against 6   This is a question Eileen John asks in her paper “Love and the Need for Comprehension” (2013).

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the “existentialist-behaviorist types of moral psychology” (p. 9) who claim that “mental concepts must be analyzed, genetically and so the inner must be thought of as parasitic upon the outer” (p. 10). On such a view M’s change of mind about D is an empty activity, because no kind of outer structure is present. But Murdoch wants to show that M is engaged in an internal struggle and that her activity feels very familiar. Furthermore, M’s activity is peculiarly her own: she could not do this thing in conversation with another person, so the quasi-scientific notion “anything which is to count as definite reality must be open to several observers” cannot be applied to this example (p. 22). Murdoch’s point is that what M is doing, that is, focusing her attention outside herself, counts as a moral activity. Murdoch even puts this activity, that is, love, at the center of morality. Murdoch’s entire concept of love and morality is a concept of progression: loving attention (and being good) is “infinitely perfectible” (p. 23). Loving, or the picture she paints of it, has built in the notion of a necessary fallibility. M is attached to the concepts she has and can do nothing but try to see the truth. M is engaged in an endless task. As soon as we begin to use words such as ‘love’ and ‘justice’ in characterizing M, we introduce into our whole conceptual picture of her situation the idea of progress, that is the idea of perfection: and it is just the presence of this idea which demands an analysis of mental concepts which is different from the genetic one. (Murdoch 1971: 23)

What is at stake, says Murdoch, is the liberation of morality and philosophy as a study of human nature, from the domination of science (1971: 26). Morality is less to do with the isolated will jumping in and out of an impersonal logical complex, and more with the progressive attempt to see a particular object clearly. In The Sublime and the Good, Murdoch, by juxtaposing Kant and Hegel, argues that seeing that object—‘the sublime’—clearly is always a progressive attempt (Murdoch 1997). Kant thinks of the sublime as not given but only vaguely adumbrated by reason, only occasioned by natural objects (non-historical, non-social, non-human), a systematic perception of nature in which time, place, and the nature of our sensibility play no part (1997: 49). Hegel, on the other hand, makes social and historical and human and concrete what Kant has offered as abstract, non-historical, and so forth: the unity of the ethical substance is given. For Murdoch, both are wrong (or both are somewhat right!). For Murdoch, there is, contra Hegel, an

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abstract essence of morality, which she names the Good. Contra Kant, we can only perceive this essence within our own place, time, and with our own eyes, she argues. Do we really have to choose between an image of total freedom and an image of total determinism? Can we not give a more balanced and illuminating account of the matter? I suggest we can if we simply introduce into the picture the idea of attention, or looking, of which I was speaking above. I can only choose within the world I can see, in the moral sense of ‘see’ which implies that clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral effort. (Murdoch 1971: 35–36)

Murdoch argues that moral tasks are characteristically endless, not only because, within a concept, our efforts are imperfect, but also because as we move, really look and open up, our concepts themselves are changing (1971: 27). “M’s independence of science […] rests not simply in her moving will but in her seeing knowing mind” (p. 27). Love is getting to know the individual, and M confronted with D has an endless task. At the end of the example, M sees D as ‘spontaneous’ and ‘delightfully youthful’. But since M has an endless task, the example might as well go on while M continues to look upon D with loving attention. It might be the case that M later alters her view of D from ‘spontaneous’ to ‘somewhat impulsive’, for example, after continuously looking at D without letting her own desires and needs play a part. This imaginative continuation of the example also shows that loving attention is not meant to be ‘judging everything as positive’; it is about trying to see the Good as an obedience to reality, while knowing that we could never fully grasp that reality. Even though Dante will never fully grasp Beatrice’s reality, opening his eyes, engaging in loving attention, focusing on Beatrice as particular and unique beyond his ego, is engaging in moral activity. It is not the facts, the outer activity, or mental concepts that can be analyzed that matter morally. It is the inner activity, the effort of directing our attention on individuals, of obedience to reality as an exercise of love. Murdoch suggests that ‘reality’ and ‘individual’ present themselves to us in moral contexts as ideal end-point, an end-point imperfect humans cannot ever reach, but must aim at. “This surely is the place where the concept of good lives. ‘Good’: ‘Real’: ‘Love’. These words are closely connected”, writes Murdoch (1971: 41). The value of using the concept of love as an ongoing practice is thus that we have to adjust our concepts constantly to the reality outside us.

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Dante is never done getting to know Beatrice; never will he have an amount of knowledge of Beatrice that is a particular end-goal. The value of the practice of love is not in the knowledge we have of our beloveds, but in the ongoing effort to get to know each other. Dante could argue that he knows Beatrice, but he is not able to move away from his ego, not able to get rid of his harmful self-serving fantasies, unless he engages in an ongoing effort of really looking at her. Suppose Dante would engage in loving practice and learn that Beatrice is interested in mathematics, is a big fan of hip-hop, and has a birth mark on her left forearm. Although he now has some knowledge of Beatrice, the moment Dante quits this practice, the dangers of the ego are lurking. Firstly, he doesn’t learn more about Beatrice, and harmful fantasies about the things he doesn’t know about her yet—for example, ‘women effortlessly having no body hair’—could prevail. Secondly, Beatrice could change—for example, changing her musical preference from hip-hop to neo-soul—and Dante would be stuck with an old image of her, back again at being blind for the real Beatrice. The ongoing aspect of love as a practice is important to ensure that we don’t fall back on fantasies. Velleman’s account is not equipped to improve the way we love, in this sense too, because he fails to incorporate this ongoing activity. The phrase ‘love as a practice’ already reveals something about the nature of this love considering knowledge of the individual. Knowledge seems to be the result, while ‘getting to know something or someone’ is the activity, the progressive attempt Murdoch describes as love. To be better lovers is not about what or how much knowledge we have of each other, but rather about the practice of being open to others. Loving is attending, not the knowledge we get out of this attention. Surely we do want our lovers to know something about us, but there’s no threshold of how much we should know about our beloveds to speak of love in this sense. In her paper “Love and the Need for Comprehension”, Eileen John defends the possibility of love with failure of comprehension (2013). She argues that the beloved person has a say as to the kind and depth of knowledge that is required to count as loving him or her. The beloved has to be able to recognize herself in the love (2013: 286), and this involves acknowledging the beloved as a being with consciousness, interests, and authority over what is important to her. This might solve Beatrice’s problem: Dante’s love would not count as love because Beatrice probably would not feel acknowledged as herself. But it does not fix the problem of reflective appraisals: fantasies lead to (harmful) expectations that many

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beloveds want to live up to. In the light of this mechanism, it seems strange to ‘put the burden’ of whether someone’s love counts as love on the beloved person (having a say as to the kind and depth of knowledge is required to count as loving her), while at the same time, the beloved adapts—or feels pressure to adapt—the qualities or interests of what the knowledge is about to the fantasies of the lover. I suggest that we should not look at thresholds for knowledge to speak of love, but rather at progressive attempts. It is not the knowledge that others have of us that makes love meaningful. It is the effort of a lover willing to put their ego aside and open up, the ongoing activity of really looking at us. Furthermore, the knowledge our lovers have of us is always colored by the particular concepts they have. A lover might know that I’m a philosopher, but her concept of what that exactly entails depends on her concepts and experiences—her frame of reference. What is so particular meaningful in loving is that it is a constant attempt to look past our own egos and see the people and things around us. My lover constantly adapts her concept of what a philosopher is by continuously looking at me and my experiences. Loving forces us to adjust what we know to what we see, but since what we see depends on what we already know, the activity is progressive and infinitely perfectible. If we keep attending to everything outside us, we can come to know more and more about the world and the people around us. This is not to say that we should accept everything we see or work toward that: really looking could reveal things we should not be accepting. Loving attention precisely is able to discern immorality and inequality by ‘seeing someone’s truth’, as well as discovering patterns and see social structures as these are part of the particular person we are attending to (Clarke 2012). Attending to someone could on the one hand reveal some possibly good character traits or explanations of character, but it will also reveal that person’s immoral actions and character traits we disapprove of. Loving in this sense is the opposite of blindly embracing: really looking can be eye-opening. We only have our own eyes to look with, our own backgrounds, culture, upbringing, and so forth. It is inevitably difficult to form connections when we notice differences between ourselves and others. It might take much longer before we are able to really look at those who are different and it might take a while before we can even catch a glimpse of their reality. Some groups or experiences are almost invisible because of, for example, non-appearance in the media or science. Love as attending to the

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things outside ourselves could therefore not only make us better (romantic) lovers, but make us form meaningful connections with people of different genders, skin colors, sexual preferences than our own. Are we willing to escape our self-serving egos? If we are willing to put in some effort and engage in an ongoing activity of opening up to each other, to put our ego aside trying to see each other’s truths, we could all be progressively better lovers.

References Abramson, Kate, and Adam Leite. 2011. Love as a Reactive Emotion. The Philosophical Quarterly 61 (245): 673–699. Alighieri, Dante. 1294. Vita nuova. Bagnoli, Carla. 2003. Respect and Loving Attention. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 33 (4): 483–515. ———. 2018. Constrained by Reason, Transformed by Love: Murdoch on the Standard of Proof. In Murdoch on Truth and Love, 63–88. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Baker, Lynn A., and Robert E. Emery. 1993. When Every Relationship is Above Average. Law and Human Behavior 17 (4): 439–450. Bortolotti, Lisa. 2018. Optimism, Agency, and Success. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (3): 521–535. Buunk, Bram P., and Regina J.J.M. van der Eijnden. 1997. Perceived Prevalence, Perceived Superiority, and Relationship Satisfaction: Most Relationships are Good, But Ours is the Best. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 23 (3): 219–228. Clarke, Bridget. 2012. Iris Murdoch and the Prospects for Critical Moral Perception. In Iris Murdoch: Philosopher, ed. Justin Broackes, 227–253. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fowers, Blaine J., Eileen Lyons, Kelly H.  Montel, and Netta Shaked. 2001. Positive Illusions About Marriage Among Married and Single Individuals. Journal of Family Psychology 15 (1): 95. Frankfurt, Harry. 2009. The Reasons of Love. Princeton University Press. Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. New York. Grenberg, Jeanine M. 2014. All You Need is Love? In Kant on Emotion and Value, 210–223. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Harcourt, Edward. 2009. Velleman on Love and Ideals of Rational Humanity. The Philosophical Quarterly 59 (235): 349–356. Haslanger, Sally. 2012. Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique. Oxford University Press. hooks, bell. 2000. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Pluto Press.

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———. 2001. All About Love: New Visions. Harper Perennial. John, Eileen. 2013. Love and the Need for Comprehension. Philosophical Explorations 16 (3): 285–297. Jollimore, Troy. 2011. Love’s Vision. Princeton University Press. Keller, Simon. 2000. How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Properties. American Philosophical Quarterly 37 (2): 163–173. Kolodny, Niko. 2003. Love as Valuing a Relationship. The Philosophical Review 112 (2): 135–189. Lopez-Cantero, Pilar. Manuscript. Loving a Narrator. Manne, Kate. 2017. Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Oxford University Press. Merritt, Melissa McBay. 2017. Love, Respect, and Individuals: Murdoch as a Guide to Kantian Ethics. European Journal of Philosophy 25 (4): 1844–1863. Millgram, Elijah. 2004. Kantian Crystallization. Ethics 114 (3): 511–513. Milligan, Tony. 2013. Valuing Love and Valuing the Self in Iris Murdoch. Convivium: Revista de Filosofia. Murdoch, Iris. 1971. The Sovereignty of Good. Routledge. ———. 1997. The Sublime and the Good. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi. New York: Penguin. Murray, Sandra L., John G. Holmes, and Dale W. Griffin. 1996a. The Benefits of Positive Illusions: Idealization and the Construction of Satisfaction in Close Relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70 (1): 79. ———. 1996b. The Self-Fulfilling Nature of Positive Illusions in Romantic Relationships: Love is Not Blind, But Prescient. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71 (6): 1155. Rich, Adrienne. 1995. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978. WW Norton & Company. Rusbult, Caryl E., Paul A.M. Van Lange, Tim Wildschut, Nancy A. Yovetich, and Julie Verette. 2000. Perceived Superiority in Close Relationships: Why it Exists and Persists. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79 (4): 521. Smuts, Aaron. 2013. In Defense of the No-Reasons View of Love. Velleman, J. David. 1999. Love as a Moral Emotion. Ethics 109 (2): 338–374. Widdows, Heather. 2018. Perfect Me. Princeton University Press. Wolf, Naomi. 1991. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women. Random House. Zangwill, Nick. 2013. Love: Gloriously Amoral and Arational. Philosophical Explorations 16 (3): 298–314.

CHAPTER 5

Love, Choice, and Taking Responsibility Christopher Cowley

There is a long-standing philosophical discussion about the relationship between love and choice. The most simplistic versions (in the case of romantic love and friendship between adults) see love as something one “falls” into, without any choice at all or (in the case of family love) as something that one grows up with and grows into, again without choice. I certainly do not want to deny this important passive element. A more sophisticated account of love would accommodate some degree of indirect choice. For example, I can feel an initial interest in a person and choose to seek her out more, thereby improving the chances that love will develop. I can also choose to create and sustain the conditions that support love, for example, by avoiding infidelity and long commutes. However, indirect choices, as exemplified above, are relatively discrete or time-limited. In contrast, I want to explore a more temporally extended kind of choice, which starts when I take responsibility. I will argue that one essential component of longer-term adult romantic and friendly love requires the lover to take prospective responsibility—as a kind of attitude—for meeting the beloved’s (friend’s) unpredictable and possibly onerous needs in the

C. Cowley (*) School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Cushing (ed.), New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72324-8_5

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future. This kind of attitude is sometimes described as sensitivity or a kind of attention, but I do not believe these concepts are robust enough to capture the phenomenon.

5.1   The Little Prince My starting point is a book ostensibly for children, but also a perennial favorite among adults: St Exupery’s The Little Prince (2001/1943). The Prince is visiting the earth from his home planet and meets a fox. The Prince is lonely and wants to play. “I can’t play with you. I’m not tamed,” says the fox. “What does ‘tame’ mean?” asks the Prince. Taming means to “establish ties,” says the fox, and continues: To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like 100,000 other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like 100,000 other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world.

Later on, the Prince talks to a rose and compares the earthly rose to his own rose back on his home planet. You are beautiful, but you are empty. […] To be sure, an ordinary passer-by would think that my rose looked just like you − the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; […] Because she is my rose.

He eventually returns to the fox to say goodbye, and the fox tells him: “you become responsible, for ever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose.” I have to address a translation issue right away. The verb and adjective “tame” has unfortunate connotations in English, which would seem to make the word inappropriate in any discussion of mature, mutually respectful adult love. After all, the Taming of the Shrew has always been problematic in this respect. But the etymology of the French word apprivoiser is revealing: it comes from the Latin “to make private.” This is much richer than merely taming or domesticating the wild animal, let

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alone the wild woman. Making private means bringing another person into the privacy of one’s own life. Understood this way, taming can be symmetrical and non-oppressive. It could refer not only to the adaptations and compromises necessary to share a household (and a bed) with another person, but also to the mutual attunement, to the partial sharing of ends and projects, and to the attenuation of interpersonal barriers to the point of developing the first-person plural pronoun; at that point you and the other person have a joint privacy and can confront the world as a “we.” And as the fox points out, once you lovingly bring a person into your private lifeworld, you have taken responsibility for them. This central role for responsibility is what I want to explore.

5.2   Responsibility Unfortunately I am defining one polyvalent term, “love,” in terms of an equally polyvalent term, “responsibility”! So I need to make distinctions. Perhaps the most obvious form of responsibility is retrospective and has to do with answerability for past actions. “Who is responsible for this mess?” probably means two things: (1) who is causally responsible, that is, “who did it (or failed to prevent it)?” and (2) who is morally responsible, in the sense of “who is an appropriate target for blame?” This kind of responsibility is most forcefully on display in the criminal justice system. But it is not my main concern here. A second meaning of responsibility is prospective. I am responsible for something in the future. There are two versions of this, which I will call “closed” and “open.” The closed form of prospective responsibility concerns a specific duty attached to a role. A job description typically comprises a list of responsibilities. “Who’s responsible for after-sales support?” “Oh, that’s Smith.” Customers will have certain typical needs or complaints after sale, and Smith is ready—into the future, so long as she continues to fill the role—to carry out certain procedures (e.g. warranty-backed refunds) to meet these needs and resolve these complaints, in accordance with her employment contract, with company policies, and with business and legal norms. The cost and the risks of after-sales support are built into the business plan and the original purchase price. In contrast, open prospective responsibility involves a readiness to deal with someone else’s future needs and wants that are much less predictable than those of the customer. And they may be unpredictable not only in terms of the precise content, but also in terms of their onerousness on me

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(and their incompatibility with my other future, partly unknown commitments). When I am prospectively responsible in this more open sense, I might not be able to confidently imagine much about my future interactions with the other. And yet despite the risks and uncertainty, this is the sort of responsibility that the fox is talking about. Insofar as the fox is my friend and I love it, then I make myself available to the fox into the future—I take responsibility for it.1 The word “responsibility” obviously comes from the concept of “response.” In the retrospective sense, holding someone morally responsible means I am asking them to respond appropriately to the damage they have caused, for example, with apology or compensation. In the prospective sense, taking responsibility for after-sales support means a commitment to respond to the customer’s predictable future needs insofar as such needs relate to their legitimate purchase of our company’s products or services. However, responding appropriately to the unpredictable future needs of a beloved or a friend is much riskier. It’s all very well for me to tell my friend sincerely: “whatever you need, just give me a call”; but when that friend starts to need me too much, then it will strain the friendship. With the after-sales service, there might come a point where the demanding customer can be dismissed or ignored: “we have helped them as much as could reasonably be expected, and we have no further legal or moral obligation.” Alternatively, if I find the job of after-sales support simply too onerous, I can always quit my job without reproaching either myself or my employer. I can say to myself: “I did not understand the responsibilities I was signing up for, now I do, and it’s just not for me.” But such a “graceful exit” is much more difficult when a friendship is tested by unexpected asymmetrical needs. Some friendships are deepened by such testing; others fall apart, and often it will be a matter of luck whether a particular friendship is tested in a constructive or destructive way. (1) If my friend’s future needs had been a little more predictable or a little more typical, then I might have been able to make a more informed decision about the degree of friendship I wanted to offer at the start; (2) if the needs had been a little lesser, or if my competing commitments had

1  Although note that in the original French, the fox is le renard, in other words masculine. English relegates most animals to “it,” and this already hinders the possibility of friendship. To take responsibility for an “it” is quite different from taking responsibility for a “him.”

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been a little lesser, or if others had been able to help, then I would have been able to help her. Some breakdowns can be a matter of sadness without bitterness, especially when there is evidence of a non-culpable change of personality, interest, or circumstances. However, my inability or unwillingness to respond to the other’s unexpected needs can lead to a bitterness in her that hardens into a sense of betrayal, perhaps to the point of retrospective redefinition: “I guess you were never really a friend at all,” she tells me. And I have to acknowledge that she might be entitled to think this, just as I have to acknowledge the lameness of my self-consoling thought that my past commitment had been sincere. I will return to the issue of retrospective redefinition erelong. Throughout, I may see myself as lacking choice, in accordance with the simplistic passive model of love. This person and I happened to feel affection for one another when we met, we became friends, and we took responsibility for one another. But later, when she presented her unpredictable and burdensome needs on me, I discovered (passively) that my affection was not up to the task. I blame bad luck. However, if it really were only a question of mere bad luck and passivity, then I would not be left with such a bad feeling about it. There has to be more room for my agency.

5.3   Taking Responsibility I have already hinted at two kinds of open responsibility-taking, which I can now distinguish explicitly as “easy” and “hard.” When I first meet the person, and we like each other and become friends, then part of what it means to become a friend is to take open prospective responsibility for her unpredictable future needs. Acting on affection, it is relatively easy to say “whatever you need, give me a call.” Later, when we have been friends for a while, my friend develops a need which is surprising and onerous. At this stage I can take “hard” responsibility by making larger adjustments to my life in order to meet her need and steeling myself for future needs (which may now be more predictable, but may not). In so doing, our friendship has been tested, and, if I am able, I can choose to deepen it. Actually, it would be better to speak of the comparative—“harder” rather than “hard”—since I may be tested even more in the future. At any rate, it is the hard responsibility-taking that interests me, the one that makes or breaks the friendship.

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(Again I emphasize the onerousness. If the friend’s need is surprising but not onerous, then I can meet it easily under the scope of the original open prospective relationship-taking; our friendship has not really been tested, and I have faced no difficult choice.)2 In most discussions of responsibility, taking is reducible to being. If I am retrospectively responsible for spilling the milk, then I ought to take responsibility for it now by cleaning it up. Alternatively, I might refuse to take responsibility because I do not see myself as being responsible, and we may argue about the basis for my alleged responsibility—but I will still agree that if I were responsible, then I ought to take responsibility. There is also a more interesting form of taking retrospective responsibility, described by Susan Wolf as a “nameless virtue,” something akin to generosity. Her discussion is entirely about retrospective responsibility, but the basic idea will be useful for my discussion of prospective responsibility as well. It involves living with an expectation and a willingness to be held responsible for what one does, understanding the scope of “what one does,” particularly when costs are involved, in an expansive rather than a narrow way. It is the virtue that would lead one to pay for the vase that one broke even if one’s fault in the incident was uncertain; the virtue that would lead one to apologize, rather than get defensive, if one had unwittingly offended someone or hurt her. (Wolf 2004: 121)

Wolf’s point is that we have to acknowledge the “messiness and the irrational contingencies of the world” (p.  122). In seeking to calculate blameworthiness too precisely, we might withdraw from “the only ground on which it is possible for beings like ourselves to meet” (ibid.). In short, when there are certain kinds of doubt about whether I am retrospectively responsible, it is virtuous to take responsibility.3 Wolf recognizes the obvious risk of exploitation: a woman in an abusive marriage who is too inclined to “apologize, rather than get defensive”; the 2  My account also allows that my partner might be mistaken about her needs. Even if I am able to meet her needs, I might not do so if I judge that it is not in her interest. This should not be a matter of my judgment and my decision, but part of an ongoing conversation between two concerned equals. 3  It is interesting that Wolf argues in terms of a virtue rather than a choice; it suggests that the person already possesses the virtue, and therefore does not have to make a difficult choice, since her virtuous disposition will make it easy.

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office “mug” who takes responsibility for the broken vase because of a misguided gratitude for being hired. For the moment, if we limit the discussion to non-exploitative relationships between social equals, then Wolf has pinpointed an important virtue not only relevant between strangers but especially between loving friends. To put it another way, an ongoing friendship requires trust; when I realize that I have offended the friend, then my friendship appropriately inclines me to trust that she has good reason to be offended, even if I cannot (yet) see what I have done wrong— and so I take responsibility and apologize.4 What would it mean to take prospective responsibility in Wolf’s quasi-­ generous sense? At first glance, this might mean no more than volunteering for after-sales customer care, as one of a range of extra tasks open for ambitious employees. More complexly, one can imagine something like vicarious liability in employment law: when my employee breaks something, then I as her employer become straightforwardly liable for the damages, even if I took all reasonable care in training and supervising the employee, and even if there was no reasonable way that I could have anticipated or prevented the breakage (i.e. I was not legally negligent). But friendship is philosophically fascinating because of the absence of formal structures. There is a strong sense that—within broad limits of intelligibility about whether it is a friendship at all—it is up to us what happens to our friendship, whatever third parties might admire or criticize in us. And what you and I have made of our friendship up to now will limit the options available to me for the future, including the decision to take or not to take responsibility for your unexpected and onerous needs when they present themselves. I spoke earlier about retrospective redefinition, where one friend’s abandonment of another is taken as revealing not only the present state of 4  This would relate to Niko Kolodny’s (2003) influential conception of love as being based on “relational reasons.” Kolodny was rejecting the prominent “reasons-conception” of love. According to this conception, in order to be intelligible, love has to be based on reasons generated by the beloved’s properties: X loves Y because of Y’s properties A, B, C.  Two weaknesses of this conception are that (1) it cannot accommodate love that continues despite Y’s loss of some of the relevant properties; and (2) it cannot accommodate Y’s individuality, since in principle Y could be replaced by Z who has the same properties, or even improved versions of such properties, and X would be rationally committed to diverting his love to Z.  Kolodny’s account deals with both problems by arguing that there are such things as reasons for love, but that they lie in one’s prior relationship with X, that is that she is already my romantic partner or my friend, and that fact gives me some non-overriding reasons to continue loving her.

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the friendship, but of the whole friendship, all along. This process can also work in the opposite direction: one friend taking responsibility for another’s unexpected onerous needs does not so much deepen the preexisting friendship, but reveals the depth that the friendship had all along. The actual contained the hitherto unknown potential to collapse or to deepen. Even when there are stages in the history of a friendship, it has an irreducible narrative wholeness that remains vulnerable to future developments. Even if this invites a deterministic reading, some of the past meaning still lies within my present choice. One might even be inclined to take responsibility for a presently estranged ex-friend, precisely in order to preserve the original friendship—in a spirit of “for old times’ sake”—without any desire to resume the friendship. It is the original friendship that creates a life-long obligation, regardless of whether we have drifted apart culpably or non-culpably in the meantime, and regardless of whether I do not like or respect what my ex-friend has turned into. Again, in the words of the fox: “you become responsible, for ever, for what you have tamed.” In arguing for this conception of choice within friendship, I am drawing on a debate between different conceptions of well-being. One conception is sequential: I live through a series of moments, in each of which my well-being is based on some time-indexed objective state of affairs. If I am happy at time t1, nothing can change the value of the discrete fact of my happiness at that moment, even if my subsequent access to it at t2 (when I am unhappy) is only through more-or-less reliable memory.5 The contrasting view, instantiated by the Ancient Greek concept of eudaemonia, is holistic rather than sequential. Only an entire life can have an objective determinate value, and that value can only be fully apprehended at the end. Even if I seem to be happy during an episode, the full value of that episodic happiness will depend on the place of that episode in the story of my life, including among unknown future events. For example, when I successfully land a permanent academic job, my life seems to acquire objective well-being. When I learn that a much more deserving and needy applicant was rejected for the same job, my overall well-being is undermined.  In Gershwin and Gershwin’s song “They can’t take that away from me,” originally written for the 1937 Fred Astaire movie Shall We Dance, the narrator speaks of his beloved’s attractive and distinctive properties (e.g. “the way you wear your hat”). Even if cruel fate can take her away from me, they cannot take away my memories of her, nor can they devalue the quality of my remembered happiness with her. 5

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5.4   The Marital Vow Earlier I drew the distinction between “easy” and “hard” prospective responsibility-taking. At the start of a relationship it is easy (or easier) to take responsibility for the other’s unpredictable onerous needs. Because friendship is so amorphous, it will help to consider an institution with a certain traditional definition, launched by a formal expression of early prospective responsibility-taking: the sincere marital vow. (Sincerity is not enough, of course, if the protagonists are too young and ignorant. So I shall be assuming two people who have known each other for a while, and who are old enough—maybe 25?—to know something of the world, and something about themselves, such as what they want and what they’ll settle for.) I stress that it is the formality of the marital vow that interests me; I do not consider marital love to be so distinct from friendly love when it comes to the central phenomenon of taking responsibility. Most of what I say in the following text could apply to friendship. One form of the unconditional commitment might be to “love, honor and cherish” the other “as long as you both shall live.” But the precise words are less important than the unconditionality. Although statistically, in some parts of the world, there might be as much as a 50–50 chance that this couple will collapse or divorce, this couple sincerely and seriously believes that (1) their union will not (those statistics concern other people), and (2) they are determined to make it work, whatever it takes. What makes this possible is a clear sense of shared identity that launches the relationship. When something bad happens to her, or when she does something bad, there is a clear sense that it happens to me, or that I have done it. Even when we do not entirely share the same ends, projects, and interests, the fact that they are her ends, projects, and interests makes them mine as well.6 This notion of “whatever it takes” is interesting, because the two partners almost certainly do not know, at the time of making the unconditional vow, what it will in fact take to keep them together. When I make the unconditional vow to this person, I take responsibility not only for this person and her unpredictable needs next week or next year, but also for the person she will become, together with the unpredictable needs that she 6  David Enoch (2012) argues that identity-conferring commitments ground a sense of “penumbral” agency, which makes it possible to take partial responsibility for the other’s actions and doings as an extension of one’s own actions and doings.

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will acquire, in 10 or 20 years. In addition, the “I” who is taking the responsibility at the altar will also change more or less predictably, more or less subject to my choices, in 10 or 20 years, and this will affect the onerousness (on me) of my spouse’s unpredictable needs. So the marital vow also involves something called “second-order” responsibility-taking: I am taking responsibility for her future needs, as well as taking responsibility for becoming the future person who will be placed in the situation of having to meet her future needs. This then blurs my distinction between “easy” and “hard” prospective responsibility-taking; instead, love requires an ongoing re-taking of the responsibility. Some will say, in an existentialist vein, that it is irresponsible to make the unconditional vow in the first place, precisely because of all this ignorance about future situations, needs, and selves. Far better to take one day, week, or year at a time, governed not by a past vow made in ignorance, but by an enduring policy of absolute honesty and good faith to other and to self. If we drift apart, so be it. On the other hand, some would be inclined to say that such “existentialist” love is not love; I’m not going to take a view on that and will accept that deep and serious love is possible without longterm commitment. Generally I am reluctant to compare intimate relationships (“this one is more loving than that one”) because of the multiple forms and layers of sheer particularity in each. What I do want to reject is the existentialist’s claim that making the unconditional vow is necessarily irresponsible. Taking responsibility for the unpredictable and onerous future needs of one’s beloved is risky, certainly; but it need not be reckless. There is a role here for luck, of course; if things go badly I might come to judge that we had been reckless in making our vows, however informed our commitment and good our prospects seemed at the time. In such cases, Wolf’s quasi-­generosity might be relevant as a form of self-forgiveness in the face of ambiguous evidence to resist inappropriately destabilizing redefinition. At the simplest level, taking responsibility at least means that one can, as Solomon puts it, “promise to abstain from activities that will endanger love. One can more positively promise to nurture conditions that are conducive to love. One can even promise to adopt or strive for attitudes and perspectives which are constitutive of love” (Solomon 2002: 26). This is what I meant at the beginning by “indirect” choice being required for love. But I would extend Solomon’s last sentence further in two ways. First, it is not only a matter of adopting attitudes and perspectives, for such adoption can be temporary, and such attitudes can remain “tacked on” in

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a spirit of expedience in dealing with a crisis. What is more important is not adoption but gradual transformation into a person whose perception is naturally informed by the attitudes constitutive of love, and naturally resistant to the centrifugal forces that can threaten any marriage. Second, it is not just any love constituted by the attitudes I am adopting, it is love for this particular person, and that requires a deep openness to the reality of the other. And I argue that these two “extended” aspects of Solomon’s account are more accurately called “taking responsibility for my spouse” and that this is essential to marital love. It might be tempting to say that taking responsibility in the aforementioned sense is supererogatory: that is, that it is admirable when someone does it, but not blameworthy when a couple stumbles through a crisis without being able to meet one another’s needs, or when the couple collapses. Such heroism will be particularly apparent in cases of radical asymmetry of needs, as when one partner has long-term health problems that require sustained attention and effort from the other. Surely if anything is supererogatory, long-term loving care is. And yet I would deny that this is heroic, based on the subjective experience of the loving partner. From the outside we might speak of admirable love, loyalty, and devotion; from the inside, the loving partner merely does what she feels she “has to do.” This leads to a paradox: I am calling “taking responsibility” a choice, and I am saying that it is essential to love. And yet the loving partner, once she has taken responsibility, finds herself in a position without choice, where she has to respond to the needs of the other partner. And it is this lack of choice, I contend, that undermines any attempt by third parties to label it heroic. Or rather, a third party might still call it heroic, but the person will not understand that as applying to him.7

5.5   Responsibility or Duty? A lot of philosophical discussions have focused on the relationship between love and duty. Insofar as one takes “responsibility” as a mere synonym for duty, then the concept will add nothing new to that discussion. But I think 7  I stress that I am discussing this felt necessity within the context of a mutually respectful adult relationship. If a wife suffers systematic abuse at the hands of her husband, but nevertheless declares that she “has to” take responsibility for him, I would not take this, by itself, as an expression of love, and I would seek some larger description that allows for problematic insecurity and dependence.

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there are important differences between responsibility and duty, and that teasing out the differences in this final section can tell us something useful about taking responsibility. Recall the example of the one spouse who decides to look after the other spouse with a long-term illness; we might be inclined to call him heroic, but he would describe himself as doing what “has to be done”—and I would call that taking responsibility. Could this not also be called “acting on a sense of duty”? And does it matter? Let me first summarize some of the issues between love and duty. One famous conception of the contrast comes from Michael Stocker (1976), who discusses a patient enduring a long recovery in a hospital. He is lonely, bored, and restless. His friend comes to visit him. The patient thanks the friend, and the friend replies: “not at all, I’m just doing my duty.” After this, the patient gradually realizes to his horror that the friend is being perfectly sincere. Stocker’s larger point is that, according to modern ethical theories of both Kantian and utilitarian flavors, the visitor is behaving in an admirable way: he is sacrificing his own interests for the good of others, motivated by a sense of selfless duty. However, in so doing he is not being a very good friend, since the patient would reasonably hope that the visitor would be motivated by love rather than duty; duty is essentially impersonal, concludes Stocker, and merely seeks a contingent vehicle for the visitor to maximize the good. A contrasting conception of the contrast between love and duty comes from Harry Frankfurt (1998). According to Frankfurt, love is essentially a configuration of the will. For Frankfurt, love is about the necessities that I encounter in my activities with the beloved: certain characteristic things I find I “cannot” do, and others I “must” do, and Frankfurt takes these locutions at face value. In terms of the agent’s moral psychology, concludes Frankfurt, the necessities of love are just as real as the necessities of duty. Sometimes this felt necessity will be surprising (pleasantly or unpleasantly) to the lover and will reveal the quality of the love in the sense that I have been describing in the chapter. My position differs from both Stocker’s and Frankfurt’s accounts, however. In response to Stocker, I would ask: what if it were very onerous for the visitor to visit the patient on that day? Of course the patient would be delighted if the visitor acted only out of affection, but circumstances might conspire against such a visit, and then I would say that the patient should be glad that the visitor comes, even if out of duty. Not only because it is better than him not coming at all, but also because his motivating duty is an expression of the respect with which he holds the patient. Okay, replies

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Stocker, but respect is not love; respect is compatible with affective distance and reluctance. We have to be careful here about definitions, but I think a compromise position would be to describe the reluctant visitor as acting out of a sense of responsibility rather than duty. Responsibility is more than duty since it comprises a response to that particular patient and his needs; it thus avoids the impersonality and stuffiness of duty that rightly concerns Stocker. The problem with Frankfurt’s account, on the other hand, is that it is too unilateral. I can well accept the focus on felt necessity, but my worry is that there is no essential reference to the partner’s actual needs, which might first have to be ascertained with selfless attention. Frankfurt admits that his account would allow for unrequited adult love. In contrast, I have been looking at established relationships of mutual love and respect, where the love is much more than an affectionate feeling, and it is shaped by the response to the other and to her particular needs (or anticipated needs). Such a response is a matter of perception, deliberation, feeling, and spontaneous action, and this is best captured in the concept of prospective responsibility rather than necessity.

5.6   Conclusion The philosophical literature on romantic and friendly love between adults is quite sizable by now. There are distinct accounts about different manifestations of love, the varying phenomenology of love, the criteria for a relationship to be deemed loving, the kind of self-understanding required of a person loving another. I have argued that all these accounts share a fundamental omission: while some speak of responsibility, it is never much more than a corollary or consequence of love. In contrast, I have argued that a robust notion of taking prospective responsibility belongs at the center of love. For only such responsibility is sufficient to allow room for the right kind of choice, and only such choice allows the love to be authentic to the lover. Without such responsibility-taking, there is a risk that any “love” will be rooted too much in capricious feeling or comfortable habit. The fox did not speak of love, and it is not clear that the Little Prince would have understood him if he had; instead the fox spoke of uniqueness, of taming, and of responsibility.8

8

 My thanks to Simon Cushing for comments on the first draft of this chapter.

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References Enoch, D. 2012. Being Responsible, Taking Responsibility, and Penumbral Agency. In Luck, Value and Commitment; Themes from the Ethics of Bernard Williams, ed. Ulrike Heuer and Gerald Lang, 95–132. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frankfurt, H. 1998. Duty and Love. Philosophical Explorations 1 (1): 4–9. Kolodny, N. 2003. Love as Valuing a Relationship. Philosophical Review 112 (2): 135–189. Solomon, R. 2002. Reasons for Love. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 32 (1): 1–28. St. Exupery, A. 2001/1943. The Little Prince (Trans. Katherine Woods). Paris: Egmont. Stocker, M. 1976. The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories. The Journal of Philosophy 73 (14): 453–446. Wolf, S. 2004. The Moral of Moral Luck. In Setting the Moral Compass. Essays by Woman Philosophers, ed. C. Calhoun, 113–127. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 6

Not All’s Fair in Love and War: Toward Just Love Theory Andrew Sneddon

All’s fair in love and war. (proverb) 3. 1] To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: 2] A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; 3] A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; 4] A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; 5] A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; 6] A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; 7] A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; 8] A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. (Ecclesiastes 3: 1–8; King James Version)

A. Sneddon (*) Department of Philosophy, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Cushing (ed.), New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72324-8_6

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6.1   Love and War: Getting Started I take it that none of us believes that, in the name of love, anything goes. The first documented appearance of the proverb about love and war in its familiar form is in the novel The Relapse, or Myrtle Bank, which was published in 1789, where it is cast as a “confounded lie”. The contrary idea, that there are conditions under which the pursuit of love is appropriate, and other conditions under which it is not, is ancient, as the famous passage from Ecclesiastes shows. These verses are notable for showing that the consideration of the moral status of love and war in the same breath is also ancient. If one’s curiosity were sufficiently piqued by noticing the long-standing juxtaposition of love and war, then one might become interested in the details of their comparison. Is this linkage superficial, even coincidental? Or is there wisdom here? To answer these questions, attention would need to be given to similarities and differences between love and war. This requires the mustering of some information; in advance of the work, we can’t say whether there is anything of interest here. But suppose that one is not particularly moved by the mere habit of mentioning love and war together.1 Is there another reason to think that there is some prima facie merit in studying love and war together? There is, but to see it we need to attend to two ways in which we might conceive of war. First, and quite naturally, we can think of war explicitly in terms of conflict, and even (although secondarily) as characterized by animosity. This way of thinking of war makes it inapt for functioning as a model for love: not only does love not necessarily involve conflict or animosity, but it is reasonably taken to be antithetical to both. Second, however, we can think of war explicitly in terms of a common feature of human life with very high stakes, especially the risk for harm. This approach offers a much more promising model for love: besides also being a common feature of human life, its potential for being the best part of a life, or the worst when things go awry, is famous. As it happens, the most famous body of thought about the ethics of war conceives of it largely in terms of harm, and only secondarily in terms of conflict and animosity. This long tradition of attention to questions concerning the initiation and pursuit of war is known as “Just War 1  Indeed, some find the very idea of the exercise cynical. Hopefully the next two paragraphs help to alleviate this worry. For more, see the discussion of Realism further in the chapter.

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Theory”. Seen at the right degree of abstraction, Just War theorists have articulated a body of ideas concerning the achievement of the ends characteristic of a common feature of human life while being sensitive to, and minimizing, the harm that can be involved therein. At this level of abstraction, such ideas promise to apply straightforwardly to love. Whether this is really the case, of course, depends on the details. Accordingly, here is my plan: first, I shall briefly describe some of the ideas of Just War Theory. This will demonstrate the harm-centric approach of this body of work. Second, I will adapt the questions and concepts from Just War Theory to apply to love. This will give us the framework for “Just Love Theory”. Just as Just War Theory focuses on conduct and its stakes rather than on sentiment, Just Love Theory applies to conduct in the pursuit of loving relationships. Sketching some of the outlines of Just Love Theory will provide some details to think about in order to see whether the ancient and perennial juxtaposition of war and love is superficial or wise. I think that we find something interesting and potentially fruitful here, but more details than can be provided in this exploratory fashion are needed for a full evaluation.

6.2   Just War Theory The concerns of Just War Theory are typically divided into three parts. There are considerations governing when it is morally acceptable to go to war, known as jus ad bellum considerations; considerations governing conduct during war, known as jus in bello; and considerations governing what is owed after war has ended, known as jus post bellum issues. Undoubtedly concerns relevant to love can also be divided this way, but I will focus on conditions governing the beginning of a loving relationship and considerations governing conduct during a loving relationship, so I shall put jus post bellum concerns aside. Here is an adapted version2 of what Helen Frowe offers as a standard list of jus ad bellum conditions, that is, as criteria that must all be satisfied for it to be morally acceptable to begin a war: 1. Just Cause; 2. Proportionality; 3. Reasonable Chance of Success; 2  I have dropped an independent condition of Right Intention as it is so closely linked to the Just Cause condition, and since I will not be using it when I turn to love.

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4. Legitimate Authority; 5. Last Resort; 6. Public Declaration of War (Frowe 2011, p. 50). Here are some details.3 The Just Cause condition is the most important ad bellum consideration. Given that war is so destructive, it has been thought that not just anything can be allowed to be a valid reason for beginning a war. The centuries of thought about the Just Cause condition have slowly settled on the idea that just wars must be a response. The gold standard just cause for a war is an attack, such that the war is clearly undertaken for defense. Trickier questions arise with the justifiability of first uses of military force in response to threats. More than a just cause is needed for it to be morally acceptable to enter a war. The other ad bellum considerations are articulations of what else besides a just cause is needed for there to be an overall acceptable case for beginning a war. The Proportionality condition requires that military force be a proportionate response to the just cause. War can be an overreaction to certain violations of national sovereignty. The Reasonable Chance of Success condition gives voice to the idea that futile wars cannot be justifiably begun. The condition of Legitimate Authority is used to distinguish between such conflicts as inter-state wars on the one hand and unorganized conflicts between mobs on the other. Violent conflicts involving non-state actors, such as terrorist organizations, fall between these poles and raise tricky questions as to whether they do or even can count as “wars”. The Last Resort condition requires that less destructive options be tried to address the just cause before war is undertaken. The Public Declaration condition is self-explanatory; its rationales include allowing public debate about the war, last-minute changes of heart by the target of the declaration, and efforts aimed at enhancing the safety of civilians. Jus in bello considerations can be articulated in various ways.4 I shall divide the territory into three conditions that must be met for morally acceptable conduct during war:

 Just some, to give a sense of the territory. Frowe notes that there is wide agreement that these are the formal conditions for beginning a war, while there is significant dispute about the substantial details of each condition. This is not the place to delve into these disputes. 4  For example, contrast Frowe (2011, Chap. 5) with Lazar (2020). 3

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A] Necessity; B] Proportionality; C] Discrimination. The Necessity condition holds that attacks during war must be of military necessity. This means that they cannot be for such things as pillaging or revenge or ethnic cleansing; they must, somehow, serve the just cause of the war. The Proportionality condition requires that the destructive means of waging war be constrained by the military ends that particular operations aim to achieve. Widespread death and destruction merely to attain a slightly better physical position on a battlefield is ruled out by the values at work here, for instance. Finally, the Discrimination condition is meant to make precise the suspicion that not all possible targets of military action are legitimate. Those waging war must distinguish between people directly involved in the violent conflict—the combatants—and people who are not. Non-combatants cannot be legitimately targeted or attacked. Just how much they can legitimately be put at risk is a tricky issue. Overall, the idea driving both the ad bellum and in bello parts of Just War Theory is that war is so destructive that it needs to be analyzed and conducted very carefully if it is going to be morally acceptable. In light of this idea, Frowe adds another in bello consideration: Realism. The so-­ called realist contends that the chaos and fear experienced by soldiers during war makes the attempt to articulate conditions for its ethical governance and control naïve. War is hell, and there are no ethical rules in hell. There are various ways that the Realist position can be articulated. One way is put in terms of whether ethical concerns apply to war at all, and as such violence is an inevitable feature of human nature. Seen this way, the Realism condition is not so much in bello as about war at every level of analysis, with the realists contending that war is outside of the domain of ethics.

6.3   Toward Just Love Theory Realism Let’s apply these distinctions to love, starting with Realism. Why should we think that love is subject to ethical analysis and regulation? After all, love is something that (in)famously befalls us. We fall in love; the metaphor suggests the inescapable pull of gravity at work with regard to who

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and when we love, rather than intentional action and an agent’s control. For there to be anything like a Just War Theory for love, love must be shown to be, in general, the kind of thing that it makes sense to evaluate ethically.5 While I’m sure that there’s much interesting things to be said about the aptness of the metaphor of “falling” with regard to love, I’m also inclined to grant this much of the objection.6 I shall assume that love, the experience, happens to us. But this leaves much for the ethicist to discuss. Let’s suppose that love (the sentiment) is in place. What’s to be done in the light of this? While in the grip of love, what may one do? What may one not do? Of particular importance are actions that concern the object of one’s love. Just as famous as the fact that we fall in love is that we tend to want to do things when in love: to make declarations of love to the beloved, to pursue special sorts of relationship with loved ones, to spend time with these people, to perform actions of a wide variety of kinds, some that we are very unlikely to perform or even to want to perform with people we do not love. In short, love is one thing, being in a loving relationship is another. Ethical considerations straightforwardly apply to loving relationships. Following the distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello considerations, we can ask questions about the conditions under which it is ethically permissible to begin a loving relationship and other questions about the sorts of conduct that are permissible within such a relationship. Following the Latin naming convention found in Just War Theory, I shall call the ethical criteria for acceptable beginning of a loving relationship “jus ad amantes necessitudo” conditions. The criteria for acceptable conduct within a loving relationship are here called “jus in amantes necessitudo” conditions. Just what counts as a loving relationship? Heterogeneity rules here; consider the similarities and differences among relationships between (respectively) close family members, lovers, neighbors, friends, and more, as well as variety within these categories. A full Just Love Theory would attend to the relevant details, but space prohibits such an extensive inquiry 5  With regard to war, the Realism concern sometimes takes the form of a worry that trying to do ethical analysis in this domain is naïve. With regard to love, the analogous worry would be that such analysis is cynical: love is inherently good, so raising questions about its justification must be to diminish this. I won’t address this directly, other than to counsel patience with the details of the discussion in order to assess whether this sort of inquiry is necessarily cynical. 6  For discussion of the justification of the experience of love, see Sect. 6 of Helm (2017).

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here. I shall confine my attention to the relationships found between, colloquially speaking, lovers.7 This territory can only be characterized imprecisely, but enough can be said for present purposes. I propose to use the experience of love as a standpoint for describing what counts as a loving relationship between lovers. My assumption is that the sentiment provides a regulative ideal for understanding loving relationships: they are the relationships called for by the experience of this emotion. Detailed analysis of the phenomenology of love would be helpful, but space prohibits such work. Instead, here are what I take to be all but platitudes about love and loving relationships: First, the experience of love is other-directed:8 we fall in love with (at least) another person. Accordingly, a loving relationship (of the sub-­ species being currently examined) is a relationship with at least one other person. Second, the sentiment of love is intimately tied up with other emotions. Happiness and sadness are obvious ones; jealousy is hardly less obvious; longing, worry, wistfulness, and, undoubtedly, others are still only just a little bit less obvious. I take this as indicating that loving relationships are sources of various kinds of emotional satisfaction and disappointment. Third, somewhat more controversially, I take it that our emotional experiences are, to some significant extent that I cannot make precise, experienced holistically when in love. Whereas happiness about an achievement when one is not in love might be experienced just as this happiness alone, such happiness is often (if not necessarily) experienced as something to be shared when one is in love. It is entwined (to some significant extent) with one’s affection for another, with the other’s feelings about this project and your own feelings, and more. Accordingly, loving relationships are ones which tend to give rise to such holistic emotional experiences. Indeed, this is one way in which we might make precise the idea that in loving another, one opens oneself up for transformation. We might be able to 7  There are other linguistic clues regarding the kind of loving relationship that is the present topic. It is the sort of relationship we have with people with whom we are “in love”. It is the kind of relationship where it is appropriate to speak of one’s “beloved”. In English, “lover”, “in love”, “beloved” (and maybe other terms) are not used to characterize the sentiment, relationship, person, or other sort of thing loved as kin, friend, neighbor, country, favorite food, etc. Philosophers have long distinguished different forms of love: eros, philia, agape. The present topic falls within eros. See Helm (2017) and Moseley (2020). 8  This does not preclude it also being self-directed, as “union” theories of love claim: for example, Scruton (1986), Solomon (1988), Fisher (1990).

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take the extent to which a relationship has this sort of holistic, identitytransforming effect on one’s emotional life as a measure of its centrality to a person, or, in other words, as a measure of the depth and significance of the love. Finally, and relatedly, the experience of love is not a passive stance taken toward another person. Typically, it gives rise to desires to do things with the other person. None of these activities is necessarily unique to love. Famously, love is experienced as, in part, a desire to be with the other person, and perhaps to live one’s life with that person. The activities involved are both famous and, when listed, banal: talking, eating, walking, sex, and more. The more one wants to do all of the activities of ordinary life with a specific other person, the more one wants to be in a loving relationship with that person. More significantly, loving relationships are not isolated from the rest of our lives: indeed, our very experience of love implicitly acknowledges the value of the myriad activities of living, as going through these activities with the beloved to a significant extent makes real, or perhaps completes, the loving sentiment one has to the beloved. Again, this is a way in which being in love can be transforming. This is not an exhaustive list. I take these characteristics to be typical of, but not necessary or sufficient for, loving relationships. This gives us the somewhat odd but important implication that one can be in a loving relationship without either party having the sentiment of love. For example, if the parties in question pursue their lives together, want to spend time together, but lack the emotional holism that I have noted, then we should think that they are in a loving relationship without the sentiment of love. I take it that such total absence of love-as-an-experience will be quite rare. Still, this conceptual space makes sense when we stand back and think about the varieties in which the experience of love comes—heated, “puppy”, mature, deep, shallow, whole-hearted, and more. Loving relationships are possible for this whole array, requiring some looseness between the experience of love and the nature of loving relationships. We shall see that this is important for taking stock of the goals that might be sought through loving relationships. These reflections about loving relationships sharpen what can be said in response to the Realism worry. Consider war: it is important to enter and to wage carefully, in some ways and not in others, because of the death and destruction that it causes. It is a massive source of waste, which can only be justified on particular grounds. The same goes for the activities of love, albeit these must be described on an individual scale rather than from the

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perspective of such groups as nations. As with war, the risk of waste in the pursuit of love calls out for ethical management. To enter and to conduct a loving relationship demands large amounts of resources from us, of various kinds. Somewhat superficially, it consumes our wealth. More deeply, to commit oneself to another in a loving relationship uses one’s time, one’s emotions, one’s attention, and generally what one has to give to others. When we enter a particular loving relationship, we can’t use these resources for other things, including a vast array of other particular loving relationships. The opportunity costs of love are massive. Without care, this all amounts to mere waste.9 It is natural to focus on one’s own perspective when thinking about entering and conducting a loving relationship, such that the risk of waste can seem thoroughly self-regarding. I think that this suffices to make this an issue of ethical import, but others will disagree, finding the idea of self-­ regarding duties suspicious. This doesn’t matter, as the self-regarding perspective is not all that matters here. The risk of waste concerns other people too, by the very standards of the sentiment of love. Love is for others and involves desires to do things with those others: other people are necessarily drawn into, and shut out of, the sort of relationships that are our topic. This centrally includes the beloved, but third parties are affected here too. Since the effects of our actions on other people are uncontroversially of ethical significance, we should think that the activities involved in loving relationships are straightforwardly subject to moral standards. Jus ad Amantes Necessitudo The jus ad bellum conditions concern when, if ever, it is justifiable to begin a war. Analogously, jus ad amantes necessitudo considerations pertain to the question, “When, if ever, is it justifiable to begin a loving relationship?” I will not weigh all of the ad bellum considerations equally in constructing ad amantes necessitudo counterparts. The least important is the condition of “Legitimate Authority”. For love, the issue is whether the 9  Strictly speaking, age makes a difference to the line of thought in this paragraph. Simply put, the older one is, the less one is putting at risk for oneself in entering a loving relationship. The same goes for the other person brought into the relationship, and for third parties. It’s an oversimplification to say that there is an inverse relationship between age and stakes, but it’s not much of one.

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person who seeks to establish a loving relationship can legitimately do so. Since love is the relevant affection, the person seeking the relationship must be capable of loving. Since a relationship with another person is sought, the person seeking the relationship must be capable of conducting such relationships. Barring particular reasons that undermine either of these capacities, psychologically competent people should be thought to be “legitimate authorities” with regard to seeking loving relationships. Among the sorts of things that undermine such legitimacy are (a) psychopathologies that preclude either love or being in personal relationships, and (b) situational contingencies that put such love or relationships out of reach. Let’s call this the condition of “Psychological Competency”. The first significant jus ad bellum condition for present purposes is “just cause”, which has traditionally been glossed as “a wrong received”: it is justifiable to begin a war only as a response to certain sorts of damage or threat. There is no reason to think that loving relationships need to be started only as responses, especially to wrongs. Loving relationships are different from war in this respect. When we seek to begin a loving relationship, we aim to establish a particular sort of relationship with another person, and we aim to do particular things with the other in virtue of love for them. Accordingly, instead of “just cause”, I suggest that to begin a loving relationship justifiably, one must be aiming at a “just target” with whom one proposes to pursue “just goals”. Just Target What is it for a person to be a “just target” for enticing into a loving relationship? Broadly and roughly speaking, the person at whom one is aiming must be “available” for joining in the relationship. “Available” here does not mean “physically local”: I don’t see why we should not pursue loving relationships that are conducted over long distances. Trivially it means “alive”, but the moral problems associated with wasting our time trying to enter relationships with persons who don’t exist (due to death or due to never having existed) strike me as worth putting aside. Instead, I mean available from the standpoint of the sentiment of love, which desires to establish a loving relationship with another person. There are three specific components to such availability. First and second, the person in question must be available in the sense of being able to join the relationship. As with the Psychological Competency condition, two things must be in place: the person must be capable of love, and they must be capable of participating in close personal relationships. All but

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rough assessment of these capacities in another is impossible for the vast majority of people. Where general psychological competency is in place, and where there are no specific reasons calling into question these two capacities, these aspects of the just target condition can be assumed to be met.10 The third component stems from the stakes involved in joining a loving relationship. When one tries to begin a loving relationship with another person, one asks that person for a lot. To join the relationship, the other must spend time, money (in all likelihood), and psychological resources on you and the relationship. This is at least costly, and potentially risky. Let me suggest that it is prima facie morally problematic to impose such costs on others without their agreement. If this is granted, then a constraint is placed on loving relationships: we must only try to begin these with people who are capable of consenting to the costs that they involve. Consent is here understood formally: the target of one’s love must possess the capacity to consent to joining in the relationship. Familiar ethical problems arise when we seek to perform complex and potentially damaging activities with and on those who are incapable of consenting to being included in these activities. As we shall see, this does not exhaust the significance of consent to the beginning of a loving relationship. The jus ad bellum Just Cause condition conceives of war as sometimes an appropriate response, typically to a wrong received. The cause is worth responding to with violent defense. Analogously, we can ask whether, to be a just target of inclusion in a loving relationship, one must be worthy of love. We should distinguish two dimensions of such worthiness: Evaluative One is the sort of person whom it is good to have in such relationships. Seen this way, the worthiness condition is satisfied in general by anyone who meets the capacity conditions of being a just target: generically, this is the sort of person whom it is good to love. Specifically, we can tell whether someone is good to love only by attending to particular details about personality. We all know that these vary interpersonally: a person good to

10  It is important not to insist on psychological normalcy. We should not assume that abnormality implies incompetence; one can be psychologically abnormal yet competent, and it is competence that matters. Nor does normality guarantee competence: it is normal for the very young not to be psychologically competent.

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include in a loving relationship with A might be unsuitable for a loving relationship with B. Deontic One is the sort of person who is owed such a relationship. I think that we should dismiss this way of understanding individual worthiness in relation to loving relationships. The reason is basic: the beginning of such a relationship is supererogatory, and hence never owed to anyone. We are all greatly fortunate when others include us in loving relationships (ceteris paribus), but we are not wronged when we are not included. The effect of analyzing worthiness of love along these dimensions is to make clear that this is not a particularly important aspect of being a just target for bringing into a loving relationship. Just Goals When we seek a loving relationship with another, “loving relationship” is probably not what we have in mind (although it might be). Rather, we have instead (or as well) more particular goals. We can divide these goals into (1) those that are internal to a loving relationship and (2) those that are external. Internal Goals By goals “internal” to a loving relationship, I mean those that have to do intrinsically with being in or running a relationship. Being partners with another is one such goal: “partner” is the name of a particular kind of relationship. Being in control of the other person is another internal goal. It is possible that personal transformation is an internal goal. If I aim to transform myself by leading my life deeply involved with another person, then such transformation must be pursued within a loving relationship. But if I aim instead at changing myself, or even at just being open to such change, then this can, in principle, be sought without being in a loving relationship. External Goals Goals that are “external” to a loving relationship are those that can be pursued without being in such a relationship. Sex, having children, securing care in one’s old age, company, and, perhaps, intimacy are external goals in this sense.

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These characterizations are not meant to be exhaustive: I have not attempted to list all possible internal and, especially, external goals. More significantly, there is no reason to think that one must have only one sort of goal in mind when one seeks to being a loving relationship, although one might. Human motivation is sufficiently complex to include both kinds. Most importantly, whether a goal of either kind is “just” is a complex matter. In some cases, goals will have features that count prima facie for or against them. I take partnership to be prima facie acceptable and control to be prima facie suspicious. Some goals have both favoring and disfavoring features. Goals that involve using the other can be like this: use of the other is prima facie morally problematic, but the particular purpose of the use might be prima facie acceptable or even laudable. To a certain extent, the overall justifiability of the goals sought in establishing a loving relationship is not independent of the other ad amantes necessitudo considerations, so let’s turn to them. I shall start with “Public Declaration”. Regarding violent conflict, for discursive and risk-minimization reasons, war must be publicly declared to be legitimate. For starting loving relationships, public declaration of one’s intentions, especially regarding the goals that one seeks via a loving relationship, is significant because of the importance of consent.11 Accordingly, let’s call this the “Public Declaration and Consent” condition. Whereas the general capacity for consent is part of what makes you a just target for inclusion in a loving relationship, this does not suffice to make any loving relationship that includes you morally justifiable. For this, you must actually have consented to the relationship. Consent thus matters to jus ad amantes necessitudo both formally and substantially. Substantially, the target of one’s love must be given a real chance of consenting to being in the relationship. For this, open declaration of one’s intentions is needed. This requirement rules out deception of the would-be beloved by the person seeking a loving relationship. For consent to be genuine and authoritative, the person giving consent must have a clear view of that to which they are consenting. Deception obscures such a view. When I lie or obfuscate about my intentions, my situation, my prospects, my health, or anything else relevant to beginning a loving relationship (which, in principle, is anything whatsoever), then you cannot completely consent to being in this sort of relationship with me, as details relevant to your consent are kept from you. 11  Kyla Ebels-Duggan (2008) makes much of the significance of the active participation of the beloved in love.

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The more significant these details are to the nature of the particular relationship, the more such deception compromises the legitimacy of my bringing you into this relationship.12 Public declarations must be answered in order for a loving relationship to be begun. Consent must actually be given; legitimate loving relationships of the sort here being examined cannot be unilaterally established. We should not assume that public declarations of intentions can take just one form. For one thing, they can vary in explicitness. Morally, the more explicit the declaration, the better it is, but suboptimal ways of sharing information can still satisfy this condition. Also, we should not insist that there be just one such declaration happening before the very beginning of a loving relationship. Relationships change over time, as do goals, so there can be good reason for more-or-less outright public declarations within a relationship that has already begun. Wanting something new can require a substantially new relationship with the same person. Consider a change from a relationship that has only internal goals to one that has external ones as well. Still, insisting that this requires a new relationship seems unrealistic to me, making the Public Declaration and Consent condition both ad amantes necessitudo and in amantes necessitudo. So far, the start of loving relationships and the significance of public declarations have been considered from the standpoint of a person seeking such a loving relationship with another and hence of the person making such a declaration. It is worthwhile to consider the perspective of the party who receives the declaration. Does the fact that another person has made a declaration to you put you in a different ethical situation from that person vis-à-vis the beginning of a loving relationship? So far as I can see, it does not: even when another has approached me, I can only enter a loving relationship if that person is a just target, and I am as much on the ethical hook for declaring things about me as the other person is. In what follows, I shall assume that there is no ethical difference in the standpoints of first declarers and responders with regard to the beginning of and conduct within loving relationships. 12  The significance of substantial consent also rules out coercing one’s target into the relationship. While one might reasonably doubt whether a loving relationship can really be established through coercion, I suspect that human activities and feelings are sufficiently complicated to include this as a real possibility, and this makes its prohibition from the standpoint of Just Love Theory significant. Systemic power imbalances can function as coercive forces that undermine the legitimacy of loving relationships sought by the powerful with the powerless.

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Consent clearly matters to the moral significance of the goals sought via a loving relationship. If I am trying to get you into a loving relationship to use you in a certain way, your consent to the use matters centrally. Consider seeking a relationship in order to have children: consent to the relationship for this purpose will be very important if it is to be morally acceptable. Abstracting from particular examples, the general ad amantes necessitudo significance of consent is best understood not in terms of consent just to the relationship abstractly understood, but rather in terms of consent to the goals sought through establishment of the relationship. Consent is not all that matters to the moral status of the goals sought via beginning a loving relationship. The other ad amantes necessitudo conditions also matter. I shall address these first in connection with goals internal to loving relationships, then in connection with external goals. The jus ad bellum condition of Last Resort requires that other options be tried before the destructive endeavor that is war is embarked upon. This in part captures the idea that, if it is to be justified, war must be necessary, and to ensure that this is so less destructive options must be tried first. Since entering a loving relationship is significantly risky and costly, both for oneself and for others, it is worth considering whether it too is really necessary. Let’s rename the relevant jus ad amantes necessitudo condition “Necessity”. For goals internal to loving relationships, the answer to this question is an automatic “yes” since they cannot be achieved outside of such relationships. The jus ad bellum Proportionality condition requires that war be a proportional response to the just cause, rather than a massively destructive overreaction. Again, since significant stakes for multiple parties are involved when a loving relationship is started, it is well worth considering whether the relationship in question is a proportional step to take regarding what one wants to achieve. It too might be far more than is justified by one’s goals. For goals internal to loving relationships, this criterion is all but automatically met. After all, the sentiment of love calls out pretty automatically for trying to establish a loving relationship with the beloved. What makes it the case that this condition is not automatically met is contingent details. These details are particularly important regarding one’s sentiments about the putatively beloved and in relation to one’s goals. Where one is mistaken, unclear, or self-deluded about what one wants or whether one really loves the person one is trying to get into a loving relationship, problems of proportionality can arise. To the extent that one already genuinely loves the target of one’s efforts, a loving relationship is

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a proportional measure. Interestingly, this means that attempting to establish such a relationship with a stranger can be acceptable by the standards of the Proportionality condition. Consider infatuation with a celebrity: a person can, in principle, know a lot about such a person and genuinely love them without ever having met them. Trying to get them into a loving relationship is not a disproportionate response to one’s sentiments in such a case, but it will likely fail by other jus ad amantes necessitudo conditions.13 The jus ad bellum condition of Chance of Victory says that futile wars are unjustifiable: their destruction is all waste. The “chance” involved here is neither a matter of guarantee nor of bare possibility, but of reasonable success. Once again, since entering loving relationships is risky, indeed, since even bringing up the possibility of such a relationship with someone is risky, then doing so ought to be undertaken only when there is some significant chance of success. Accordingly, let’s rename the relevant jus ad amantes necessitudo condition “Chance of Success”. Failure here is all but guaranteed when one’s public declaration is turned down.14 Other factors count against success to a lesser extent. An obvious case is when the beloved is already in a loving relationship with another. A slightly less clear case is when the target of one’s affections loves another but is not in a loving relationship with them. A difficult case concerns a public declaration to which the response is hesitant: the other person is unsure and wants to keep things non-committed for the time being. In such a case, continuing in hopes of establishing a loving relationship, or as if such a relationship is already in place, is deeply risky and arguably unjustified. So much for goals internal to loving relationships; let’s turn to external goals. The jus ad amantes Necessity condition asks whether a loving relationship is necessary for the goals in question. For external goals, the answer is an all but automatic “no”: by definition, goals external to loving relationships can be achieved without these relationships. This holds in principle and in a vast array of actual cases. However, it is possible for circumstances to be such that some external goal cannot be achieved outside 13  There is debate about whether love should be construed as a response to the value of the beloved: e.g., David Velleman (1999, 2008). Such a view opens up the possibility that an attempt to start a loving relationship with another can be a disproportionate response to the other’s value. See Helm (2017) for critical discussion of Velleman’s view. 14  So far as I can tell, success is impossible where the target does not exist, but I will refrain from insisting on this. People have powerful imaginations and rich lives in virtue of this, after all.

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of a loving relationship with a particular party. In such rare cases, the Necessity condition is satisfied by external goals alone. Given this point, the Proportionality condition will also typically be violated when one seeks to enter a loving relationship purely for external goals. Since these ends can usually be achieved without such relationships, to enter a loving relationship is to put unreasonably much at risk for them. It’s not just material resources that matter here; it’s our time and affections at least as much, and I, for one, am inclined to value these sufficiently highly as to count it unjustifiably risky to begin loving relationships solely for such external goals as sex, children, care in old age, and more. The Chance of Success condition rules out some loving relationships sought solely for external goals when these goals cannot realistically be achieved, either at all or through this sort of relationship. A heterosexual who seeks a loving relationship with a homosexual for the external goal of sex will fail by the standards of this condition. So too will a person who seeks a loving relationship for intimacy from someone who does not like them. More ambiguously, degree of consent to a declaration can make a difference here. Where one consents to some aspects of what is declared but not to others, the chance of the relationship succeeding (allowing varying metrics of success here) is affected, and in some cases it might be doomed. The upshot of these considerations is that it is very difficult for external goals alone to make entering a loving relationship justifiable. It is possible, but it is not at all likely. My guess is that, in reality, this does not matter much, as most people have internal goals in mind as well as external ones. However, this is an empirical wager, and I could easily be wrong. Ironically, one of the risks of entering a loving relationship solely for external ends is that one party will come to want internal goals as well, to the detriment of the relationship. The risks of love are complicated. Jus in Amantes Necessitudo The jus in bello conditions pertain to what sorts of things can justifiably be done during the course of war. The “Necessity” condition limits the justifiable use of the violent power of war to those ends that are of military necessity. The benefits and, especially, harms that are at stake outside of military parameters still matter when war is going on; the Necessity condition enjoins soldiers and military decision-makers to give them their due.

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The same goes for conduct within a loving relationship: it takes place within lives that are already up and running and for which there are stakes independent of the loving relationship. While the sources of benefit and harm that exist prior to a loving relationship might be transformed by it, they are nonetheless to a significant extent independent of it. Such things as health, financial stability, and relationships with third parties still matter after a person becomes immersed in a deep loving relationship. They matter prudentially, of course: if I am in a loving relationship, impoverishing myself for love leaves me worse off than I might be because I can’t pay my bills or do other worthwhile things with my wealth. But they also matter interpersonally, and hence in a classically morally relevant sense. If lovers encourage each other to do physically risky things because they are such enjoyable ways of pursuing their loving relationship, then they might well end up with health problems that leave them unable to care for each other at some later time. Consent to these activities mitigates the problem within the relationship, but poverty and ill-health also affect our abilities to do things for third parties. Our relationships to third parties take a wide variety of forms and involve lots of sorts of duty. A parent who is unable to take care of children properly because of excessive spending on a partner in love has done something morally remiss. Accordingly, we ought to keep the pursuit of love in check: loving relationship is deeply worthwhile and hence worth encouraging and pursuing, but the costs/risks involved should be measured by reference to thought about just what is necessary to the existence and well-being of the relationship. Beyond this, we risk wasting resources, thereby diminishing the quality of our lives and failing in our moral obligations. Let’s note three points of detail about the jus in amantes necessitudo territory of Necessity. While I have put the issue in terms of the independent value of aspects of our lives other than loving relationships, this is not merely a recognition of the general point that various things matter to us. It is a point internal to the nature of love and loving relationships themselves. Recall the fourth all-but-platitude about love and loving relationships presented earlier: to love another and to have a loving relationship with that person is to a significant extent to want to run one’s life with them. So it is a failure by the standards of love itself to lose sight of the independent value of other aspects of human life. Although I won’t lean on this point too heavily, what this means is that involvement in a loving relationship that neglects the Necessity condition will tend to be, arguably, self-defeating: a loving relationship that consumes the rest of one’s life at least risks undermining itself.

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Second, there is no reason to think that it should be easy to be able to identify whether some activity or expenditure is necessary either to the existence or to the flourishing of a loving relationship. How could it be? This is to a significant extent a matter of knowing what it is for a life to go well, and such practical wisdom is not had by all. The lack of a measuring procedure here should not lead us to think that this is impossible, however: lots of people manage to pursue both loving relationships and other things. Relatedly, the third point is that this is not an all-or-nothing matter. Sometimes we will give too much time to a loving partner, sometimes not enough. Since jus in amantes necessitudo conditions pertain to conduct during a loving relationship, they cannot be satisfied all at once, forever. Practical wisdom matters day-to-day. The general spirit of the Necessity condition overlaps with that of “Proportionality”. The jus in bello Proportionality condition holds that the use of destructive military powers must be proportional to the particular ends to be achieved. Likewise for love: there are many things we might do within a loving relationship, and hence many costs that we might incur. Some of these will be disproportionate to the value of the end to be achieved. To give up a kingdom for a kiss is too much (arguably). More realistically, let’s say that loving relationships generally require lovers to pay attention to each other and to spend time with each other. Too much attention is obsession; too much time spent on another, such as when she is trying to pay attention to other parts of her life, is stalking. That we already discourage these degrees of expenditure in the name of love indicates extant sensitivity to jus in amantes necessitudo concerns of proportionality. Proportionality has both self-regarding and other-regarding aspects. Part of the idea is that, for one’s own good, one should not overdo it with regard to the pursuit of love. The other part is that the costs/risks that come with loving relationships to which others are exposed should be kept to a minimum. “Others” includes one’s beloved. Interesting details are revealed when we focus on the other-regarding aspects of conduct during love. Let’s assume that all such conduct involves costs (time, emotion, wealth, and more). Let’s assume also that all such conduct is performed for the good of the relationship. The actions in question can be further subdivided: some will be good independently of how they conduce to the relationship, whereas others will be intrinsically morally problematic. Since we ought to minimize the harms imposed on the beloved in the course of love, we ought, ceteris paribus, to choose actions that are intrinsically good

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if possible, and not ones that are intrinsically problematic and only instrumentally good. Suppose that I want to deepen the commitment of my lover to me and our relationship. I might try to do this by slandering others to whom my beloved is emotionally attached, thereby weakening her other emotional ties and close relationships. Alternatively, I might try to make her fear life without me. I take it that to cause fear in another, especially one’s beloved, and to weaken emotional ties and relationships are prima facie problematic. Such actions should be eschewed in favor of ways of deepening the relationship that are themselves morally laudable.15 It’s not just our partners in love who are affected by the conduct we pursue within loving relationships. There are third parties also. The jus in bello condition of “Discrimination” distinguishes combatants from non-­ combatants and prohibits at least the targeting of non-combatants in military operations. The general idea is that the harm of war should be limited to those directly involved in it. Much the same holds jus in amantes necessitudo: we should not deliberately subject third parties to the risks/costs involved in the pursuit of our loving relationships. Consider again my slander in the previous paragraph: to the extent that this harms not just my beloved but also the person slandered, I ought not to do it, even in the name of love. There are more subtle issues here too. First, besides acts that cause harm, there can be harm due to inaction. Third parties who depend on us emotionally or materially should not be harmed through neglect due to diversion of our attentions by love. Second, besides the intrinsically morally problematic acts that might be performed to foster a loving relationship, the relationship itself (the love and the conduct therein) can be a burden on third parties. It can be an emotional burden, as when people so wrapped up in their love make others uncomfortable through displays of affection, inside jokes, pet names, idiosyncratic patterns of talk, and so forth. But it can also be a material burden, as when lovers deliberately rely on third parties to do things that the lovers should be doing but are not because of their relationship. I once did an unduly large part of the late-­ night cleanup jobs in a fast-food restaurant because a co-worker was patching up an argument with a boyfriend. In retrospect, this was irresponsibly much of them to ask of me. For a third thing, third parties can be involved in loving relationships in complex ways. This relates to some of the practical and conceptual 15  Presumably actions can be good in some respects, bad in others. Action-individuation is a famously vexed topic, so I won’t dwell on the issues here. See Ginet (1990) and Mele (1997).

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difficulties probed in the jus in bello context. It is wrong to target non-­ combatants; what about putting them at risk? What about incidentally harming them as so-called collateral damage? Do the values here prohibit deliberate use of non-combatants or objective harm of them? It is likewise for love. Consider a loving relationship with someone who loves other people: parents, siblings, children, and so forth. One might have no interest in love for or a loving relationship with any of these people directly, but what about as part of the loving relationship with one’s lover? Is it acceptable to direct loving activities at third parties as the means of achieving things in one’s loving relationship? What about creating people—having children—purely to serve a loving relationship? It might not be strictly possible to love any of these people as means; arguably this requires loving the person in themselves, directly (Stocker 1976). Still, activities characteristic of love and of certain sorts of loving relationships can be performed. Communicative aspects of acts are particularly important here: declarations of affection to third parties as means of pursuing a loving relationship with one’s beloved put the third parties at emotional risk at least. I’m inclined to think that the details here are sufficiently complex as to preclude saying that such involvement of third parties in the conduct of loving relationships is outright prohibited, but this complexity should also give us pause. Some ad amantes necessitudo conditions will apply to third parties as well. We bear a burden of caution at least regarding the ways and extent to which we draw third parties into loving relationships.

6.4   Conclusion Here is a list of the contours of the aforementioned Just Love Theory: • The Realism Condition • Jus ad Amantes Necessitudo: –– Psychological Competency –– Just Target –– Just Goals –– Public Declaration and Consent –– Necessity –– Proportionality –– Chance of Success

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• Jus in Amantes Necessitudo: –– Necessity –– Proportionality –– Discrimination This is not necessarily exhaustive. The moral contours of war need not map perfectly onto those of love. For a complete Just Love Theory, other sorts of love need attention. Still, there is much here to constitute the start of such a theory. One thing still missing is consideration of ethical issues pertaining to the end of loving relationships. Here love and war tend to differ deeply. There is a natural end to war, dictated by the nature of its just cause: once that has been addressed or achieved, the war should end. When loving relationships are sought solely for goals external to the relationship, there can be such a natural end. However, I take it that loving relationships are typically sought for internal ends, either solely or in combination with external ones. There is no natural end to partnership (or control, or other internal ends): since they are internal to the relationship, they can only be realized through entering and maintaining the relationship. I suspect that the conditions of jus post amantes necessitudo will differ (but overlap) depending on whether external goals have been achieved and/or internal ones have been surrendered. This deserves attention that I cannot give it here.

References Ebels-Duggan, K. 2008. Against Beneficence: A Normative Account of Love. Ethics 119: 142–170. Fisher, M. 1990. Personal Love. London: Duckworth. Frowe, H. 2011. The Ethics of War and Peace: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Ginet, C. 1990. On Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Helm, B. 2017. Love. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/ entries/love/. Accessed February 14, 2020. Lazar, S. 2020. War. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/ entries/war/. Accessed June 2, 2020. Mele, A., ed. 1997. The Philosophy of Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Moseley, A. 2020. Philosophy of Love. In The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ISSN 2161-0002. https://www.iep.utm.edu/. Accessed January 28, 2020. Scruton, R. 1986. Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic. New  York: Free Press. Solomon, R.C. 1988. About Love: Reinventing Romance for Our Times. New York: Simon & Schuster. Stocker, M. 1976. The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories. The Journal of Philosophy 73 (14): 453–466. The Relapse, or Myrtle Bank. 1789. Multiple Authors. Farmington Hills, Michigan: Gale Ecco, Print Edition 2018. Velleman, J.D. 1999. Love as a Moral Emotion. Ethics 109: 338–374. ———. 2008. Beyond Price. Ethics 118: 191–212.

CHAPTER 7

Doubting Love Larry A. Herzberg

7.1   Introduction In Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair,1 Maurice, the protagonist and narrator, recounts the following moment with Sarah, the married woman with whom he’d been having a romantic love affair: she said to me suddenly, without being questioned, ‘I’ve never loved anybody or anything as I do you.’ …We most of us hesitate to make so complete a statement—we remember and we foresee and we doubt. She had no doubts. The moment only mattered. Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness… What did time matter—all the past and the other men she may from time to time (there is that word again) have known, or all the future in which she might be making the same statement with the same sense of truth? When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the 1

 Thanks to Stewart Cole for suggesting this novel to me.

L. A. Herzberg (*) University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, Oshkosh, WI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Cushing (ed.), New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72324-8_7

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c­ onsciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week. (Greene 1951: 50–51)

Maurice’s insecurity and anxiety, which make it impossible for him to relax and fully appreciate his liaisons with Sarah, are time-driven: they are consequences of his inability to love in the present moment. As a result, he can never fully accept the love Sarah expresses when she tells him that she loves him, because (like “most of us”) he has doubts about anyone’s ability to sustain love. These doubts are based on his own experience and beliefs about human nature, but in this particular case they are strengthened by his knowledge of Sarah’s history, for she has confided to him that she’d had many prior affairs due to her husband’s inability to sexually satisfy her. Her insistence to Maurice that her love for him is unprecedented fails to convince him not because he thinks that she might be deceiving him, but rather because he fears that she might be deceiving herself. After all, despite her sincere professions of love to him, she had not yet given him any indication that she was willing to leave her husband in the foreseeable future. Sarah, by contrast, is unconcerned about both the past and the future. By loving entirely in the present, she can focus on love’s feelings as they occur. This allows her to love not only without anxiety about the future, but also without remorse, regret, or guilt—emotions usually aimed at one’s past actions. Also, Sarah’s extraordinary way of loving is no less rich for being focused exclusively on the current moment, for as Maurice muses, if eternity is considered to be timelessness rather than everlastingness, Sarah can love him eternally in the present moment.2 This, Maurice suggests, allows her to love without the sort of doubt that relentlessly plagues him. But is that so? Even if Sarah can love entirely in the present, does that really inoculate her against all doubts about the truth of her own professions of love, or at least make such doubts avoidable? Conversely, if Maurice can love only in the “ordinary” way, with one eye on the past and the other to the future, does it really follow that, for him, doubts about the truth of his own professions of love are unavoidable? My answer to both of these questions will be “not necessarily”, and laying the groundwork for that answer is the main task of this chapter. But before further addressing the epistemological questions about belief and doubt 2  Greene’s point here seems to be inspired by Wittgenstein’s comment: “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present” (1922: 6.4311).

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that concern us, we must settle on a plausible conception of what love is. Here I will describe what I take love to be only in general terms and fill in relevant details as the chapter progresses. My view of love has much in common with psychologist R. J. Sternberg’s “triangular theory”.3 In both of our views love has three main components, two of which (emotional intimacy and passion) are primarily felt or affective, the third (“decision/commitment” for Sternberg) being primarily cognitive and volitional.4 We agree that love’s “core” emotional feelings include those of closeness, affection, care, and concern, but I further hold that love’s emotional aspect includes dispositions to feel various other sorts of emotion related to one’s beloved, given certain sorts of situations.5 For instance, to mention an example to which we will return later, if I love you, I am probably disposed to feel anger on your behalf whenever I judge that someone has unjustly insulted you, even if you would not feel angry about it at all. Such “self-originating” emotional dispositions contrast with any empathetic disposition I may also have to share your emotions as I become aware of your interests and viewpoint. Secondly, for the type of love that concerns us here, love’s passionate feelings typically include those of sexual attraction toward one’s beloved, as well as feelings of certain desires, such as the desire for companionship and

3  Sternberg is Professor of Human Development at Cornell University. See Sternberg (1986, 1988) for the original formulations of his “triangular” theory of love; see Sternberg (1997) for “construct validation” of the surveys he uses as measurement instruments. For a non-technical introduction to his work, as well as a full listing of his scientific papers on love, see https://lovemultiverse.com (accessed 21 October 2020). I am not the first philosopher to have been impressed by his research; see de Sousa (2015: 80–84). 4  I further explicate these terms—particularly “volition”—below. Of the many philosophers of love, Henry Frankfurt (e.g., 1999 and 2004) is perhaps best known for having developed a “volitional” conception of love. However, by “love” Frankfurt means something far more general than interpersonal love, and his use of “volitional” equivocates between two distinct senses of the term. For an excellent critical discussion of Frankfurt’s views, see Ferreira (2015). For an illuminating history of the idea of volition or willing, see Davenport (2007). 5  Dispositions are tendencies defined in terms of manifestations, triggers, and masks. Fragility is a commonly cited example. Breaking easily is the main manifestation of an item’s fragility, but a fragile item might never break if events that would trigger the manifestation (e.g., dropping) never occur, or if the manifestation is masked (e.g., if the item were wrapped in bubble-wrap). Similarly, what is key to having a psychological disposition is that one would psychologically react and so behave in a certain way were a triggering event to occur, absent any masking conditions.

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the desires to love and to be loved.6 The satisfaction of these desires often adds to the positive phenomenology of being in a loving relationship (for instance, by grounding feelings of gratitude toward one’s beloved), but when the passions are intense they can also generate negative emotions, such as jealousy. Also, when such passions are stronger for one lover than for the other, the imbalance can lead the “needier” lover to feel ashamed and the “less needy” lover to feel resentful. Thirdly, love’s volitional aspects include any conscious, voluntary decision one may make to behave lovingly toward one’s beloved, as well as any disposition one may have to so behave, regardless of whether it was established by one’s voluntary decision or not. In other words, love’s volitional aspects include both commitment-­making and being committed, where “being committed” entails merely having a disposition to behave lovingly toward one’s beloved, regardless of its cause. That love involves feelings should be uncontroversial. Semantically speaking, “love” is a perfectly acceptable answer to the question, “What do you feel for me?”, and the “for me” here indicates that the relevant feelings are not simple sensations like itches or burns, but rather are directed at (or about) someone, and hence emotions. Emotions are felt responses to mentally represented objects, events, persons, or situations that are in some way significant to the emotional person.7 So love’s feelings qualify as being emotional insofar as they are felt responses to one’s representation of one’s beloved. Some passionate feelings, such as feelings of sexual attraction elicited by representations of another’s body, can also count as emotional.8 But if love consisted entirely of emotional and passionate feelings, it would be difficult to explain the defensiveness of a typical response to the question “Do you love me?” when it is posed in a long-term romantic relationship: “Of course I love you. How could you even 6  Sternberg takes love’s passion component to include desires for “self-esteem, succorance, nurturance, affiliation, dominance, submission, and self-actualization” (1986: 122), but these seldom show up in his research, or in the research of others using his constructs. To the extent that such desires contribute to love’s phenomenology, it is their felt satisfaction or frustration that is relevant, not their mere existence. The same is true for the desire to love and the desire to be loved, which cannot be considered constituents of love on pain of circularity; rather, I view them as being common motivations to love and to enter into loving relationships. 7  For more on this sort of view, see Ekman (1999), Lazarus (1991), Damasio (2004), Prinz (2004), and Deonna and Teroni (2012). To understand how my view diverges a bit from these, see Herzberg (2009, 2012, 2018). 8  See Herzberg (2019) for a defense of this claim.

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ask me such a thing?” For such a response clearly indicates that the respondent has interpreted the question as a sort of accusation, and accusing someone is reasonable only if they can be held responsible for having acted wrongly. The problem is that, generally speaking, we are not responsible for our having or not having emotional or passionate feelings. Rather, we are responsible for the voluntarily formed intentions that result from our consciously deciding or willing to pursue some goal, and of course for any actions that follow from these. Similarly, if love were merely affective it would be difficult to explain the appropriateness of believing oneself to have been betrayed by one’s beloved after they unexpectedly end the relationship, as Maurice believes himself to have been betrayed by Sarah when she ends their affair without explanation.9 For one can betray (or renege upon) only a commitment, agreement, or understanding that one has at least implicitly made or entered into; one cannot in the same sense betray a combination of feelings. These observations, along with others to be discussed later, indicate that any credible view of love, and in particular of romantic love, must include a volitional component. But what, exactly, do I mean by “romantic”? Here I diverge a bit from Sternberg’s use of the term, and to explain why it will be helpful to list the eight “types of love” he generates from possible combinations of emotional intimacy, passion, and decision/commitment. These are non-love (no component present), liking (emotional intimacy only, the main ingredient of friendship), infatuated love (passion only), empty love (decision/ commitment only), romantic love (emotional intimacy and passion), companionate love (emotional intimacy and decision/commitment), fatuous love (passion and decision/commitment), and consummate love (all components present).10 With his inclusion of “non-love”, mere “liking”, and “infatuated love” (his main example of which is having sex with a prostitute), I think that it would be better to call this a non-exhaustive list of relationship types rather than of love types. But more importantly, I think that Sternberg is mistaken when he suggests that romantic love does not include a significant level of commitment. He cites Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as portraying a paradigm case of romantic love, but here we should recall one of Juliet’s most famous lines, which she addresses to Romeo prior to their marriage: “O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant 9  Much of Greene’s novel consists of Maurice’s attempt to find an explanation for Sarah’s apparently having betrayed him in this way. What he discovers is the novel’s major plot twist. 10  Sternberg (1986: 122).

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moon, that monthly changes in her circled orb, lest that thy love prove likewise variable.”11 Surely this suggests that Juliet would take commitment to be essential to the sort of love she wants to share with Romeo, because it is needed to ensure constancy in a way that passion and emotional intimacy by themselves cannot.12 Remarkably, even Sternberg notes that consummate love, with its significant levels of all three components, “is a kind of love toward which many of us strive, especially in romantic relationships”.13 So I use the term “romantic love” to refer to what Sternberg calls “consummate love”, and what he calls “romantic love”, with its high levels of passion and emotional intimacy but negligible amount of commitment, I call “sexual friendship”. Obviously, there is much more to say about the components of romantic love. In particular, I have not yet specified the contents of romantic commitments, nor have I explained the important roles they play in romantic relationships. Such details will be filled in as needed while we address the epistemological questions that are our main concern. First, in the section entitled “On Believing That I Love You: Two Potential Sources of Bias”, I will outline two potential sources of bias that may cause one to believe that one romantically loves another when one does not. Then, partly on the basis of those potential sources of bias and partly on the basis of more specific issues, in “On Believing That I Am Experiencing Love’s Emotions Toward You” and “On Believing That I Am Making Love’s Commitments to You”, I will argue that, at least to the extent that one is aware of these issues, one may reasonably doubt that one is experiencing romantic love’s emotional feelings (even when one is experiencing them), and one may reasonably doubt that one is making love’s commitments (even when one is making them). Finally, in “Concluding Remarks”, I order by relative dubitability the propositions that must be true about one’s passions, emotions, and commitments toward another in order for one to romantically love them, and explain why doubts about these propositions are neither always avoidable when loving in Sarah’s extraordinary way, nor necessarily unavoidable when loving in Maurice’s ordinary way.  Shakespeare (2014), Act II Scene II.  See Fehr (1988) for independent empirical support that the ordinary concepts of romantic love and commitment significantly overlap. Fehr (559–560) takes her results to be inconsistent with Sternberg’s theory, but I think that this conclusion is based on the erroneous assumption that in Sternberg’s view the concept of commitment is entirely contained in the concept of love. 13  Sternberg (1986: 124), italics added. 11 12

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7.2   On Believing That I Love You: Two Potential Sources of Bias Suppose you ask me whether I love you romantically, and I seriously consider the question for the first time. I understand that whether I love you in this way depends on whether my attitudes toward you include emotional feelings of closeness, care, concern, and affection, passionate feelings of sexual attraction, and various sorts of commitment. There are at least two reasons for me to think that any belief I may now form that I love you is unjustified. The first is that I might so desperately want to be loved by someone I love that, given your apparent willingness to enter into such a relationship with me, I may immediately develop a “confirmation bias” that skews my judgments about my feelings and commitments toward you.14 The second is that it is probably easier for me to identify my feelings of sexual attraction toward you than it is for me to identify the various types of my emotional feelings toward you,15 due to the more distinctive and localized bodily conditions that feelings of sexual attraction register, as well as the fact that there are more types of emotion to potentially confuse, as will be illustrated in the next section. Of course, if I do first recognize that I am sexually attracted to you, this gives me reason to believe that I have met at least one of the conditions of romantically loving you. But it also gives me another reason to think that I may be biased when making judgments about how I otherwise feel toward you, as well as about my level of commitment (or willingness to commit) to you. After all, if I know that you are looking for romantic rather than infatuated or fatuous love, the ongoing satisfaction of my sexual desire may well depend on my maintaining a relationship with you that includes at least the expressions of emotional intimacy and commitment. This may motivate me to behaviorally simulate emotional intimacy and commitment, as some people simulate sexual passion to ensure the satisfaction of their other needs. Importantly, such simulation need not amount to intentional fakery. Particularly in the case of emotional intimacy, I may fool myself as much as I fool you. For 14  The motivational power of a desire to be loved should not be underestimated. In extreme cases, it can lead to horrendous behavior. This was noted by Patricia Krenwinkel, the former “Manson Family” member: “It is countless how many lives were shattered by the path of destruction that I was part of, and it all comes from just such a simple thing as just wanting to be loved.” https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/opinion/my-life-after-­ manson.html at 6:54, accessed 21 October 2020, italics added. 15  See Sternberg (1986: 120–123).

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passion-­simulators are more likely to be aware of their lack of passion than emotion-­simulators are likely to be aware of their lack of emotion, given that passion—or the lack thereof—is more accessible to conscious awareness.16 So if I desire to be loved and I am sexually attracted to you, I initially have at least two reasons to think that any judgment I make that I love you may be biased and hence lack adequate justification. This bias could affect both my introspective judgments concerning my present attitudes toward you, and any inferences I might draw from my memories of how I’ve behaved toward you.17 It is true that if I remember that I’ve expressed very few of love’s feelings and commitments toward you, that may be evidence that I do not love you. But my lack of expression could also be due to quirks of my personality of which I am unaware; for instance, I might simply tend to squelch any expressions of emotional intimacy due to insecurity. By the same token, if I remember that I have expressed many of love’s feelings and commitments toward you, I have to allow that those expressions may have been due to the sort of strongly motivated simulation just discussed. Of course, I might also try to remember the relevant feelings and voluntary acts of commitment-making themselves, rather than merely their expressions. But using my memory here would seem to be no more reliable than attempting to introspect my current mental states and attitudes, despite additional concerns that may arise about the reliability of that process. Since those additional concerns do not entirely overlap in the cases of emotional feeling and commitment, I will explore each of them in turn.

7.3   On Believing That I Am Experiencing Love’s Emotions Toward You Can I reliably type-identify, conceptualize, or “label” love’s emotions based merely on the way they feel to me? For the moment, let’s assume that I can always tell what my emotional feelings are about, so we can focus only on the nature of the feeling itself. Let’s also assume that the qualitative properties of such feelings can, like those of sense perceptions, be  Ibid.  Sternberg recognizes the possibility of bias in his subjects’ self-reports of their feelings and commitments toward their partners due to their “tendencies to idealize their own relationships” (1997: 317). 16 17

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embedded in phenomenal concepts and stored in long-term memory for later use in recognizing the types of “incoming” emotional feelings.18 For instance, suppose that as young children we have sensational experiences that we can recognize based on their qualitative properties (how they feel to us), and given the situations in which they occur, we learn from our linguistic communities to label those types of sensations as feelings of fear, anger, sadness, joy, and so on. Even on those assumptions, there are good reasons to doubt the reliability of any process of emotion-type recognition that rests exclusively on qualitative comparison. For ranges of sensations can count as being of the same type, and the borders of those ranges tend to be vague. This is clearest in the case of color sensations, where it may be explained by the continuity of the light frequencies registered by the retina, as well as by the visual system’s limitations when it comes to distinguishing between some number of adjacent frequencies. Think, for instance, of the many shades of blue, and the narrower range where it seems arbitrary to conceptualize a color sensation as being a shade of blue or a shade of turquoise. Such indeterminacy and vagueness seem similarly evident in the emotional case, where ranges of somatosensory sensations can count as being of the same qualitative type, and we have good reason to believe that there is even more vagueness between emotion types that feel similar, given that the bodily conditions the somatosensory system registers during emotion occurrences—heart rate, respiration, muscular tension, hormone levels, and so on—substantially overlap between emotion types. Even the most central instances of emotional feeling types seem qualitatively similar to those of other types, including types relevant to forming a justified belief that one loves another. For instance, in trying to determine whether my feelings toward you are those of romantic love or merely those of infatuated or fatuous love, it would be important for me to figure out whether I tend to feel affection for you, or whether I tend only to feel sexually attracted to you. But based merely on the ways they feel, low levels of sexual attraction might be mistaken for moderate levels of emotional affection; that is, a simmering level of passionate “heat” might easily be misinterpreted as a moderate level of emotional “warmth”.19 18  See Chalmers (2003) for discussion of phenomenal concepts and Gertler (2001) for discussion of how the “embedding” of qualia in concepts might take place. 19  Sternberg (1986: 122) distinguishes between emotional warmth, passionate heat, and cognitive coldness. The temperature metaphor’s aptness is easy to explain if we view emotional and passionate feelings as being somatosensory registrations of bodily conditions, and cognition as being primarily neurological.

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But if I tend to experience only sexual attraction toward you, I do not love you romantically. Consider next a case in which recognizing what my feeling is about is necessary for me to determine its type, but in which I am not able to discriminate between two relevant alternatives. For instance, suppose that shortly before you ask me whether I love you, you mention to me that you’ve been feeling a bit ill, and this conversation is taking place during a deadly pandemic. I immediately feel distressed, but I’m not sure whether I am feeling concern about your condition or rather anxiety that I might catch the disease from you. If I am experiencing the concern, I should probably count it as evidence that I love you (such concerns being among love’s core emotions), but if I’m rather experiencing the anxiety, I probably should not; indeed, it might even provide me with evidence that I do not love you. To the extent that concern and anxiety have similar qualitative properties, it might be impossible for me to discriminate between the two emotions based merely on how they feel. But how then can I tell that my feeling is about you or about me? Especially if I have prior knowledge that I tend to feel anxious about catching deadly diseases, I may well be unable to justifiably infer that I am feeling concern about your condition, even if I am. There are also reasons to be concerned about the reliability of emotion-­ type identifications based on what one takes to have caused or elicited one’s feeling, even when one has no trouble determining this. For instance, suppose that what justifies inferences from an emotion’s cause to its type is that emotion types are strongly associated with “paradigm scenarios” to which they are normal or appropriate responses.20 More specifically, suppose that any emotion felt in response to a situation that sufficiently resembles a paradigm scenario of a given emotion type is highly likely to be an emotion of that type. Using such a view by itself to justify emotion-­ type identifications fails to adequately allow for unusual emotional responses due to atypical emotional dispositions. For instance, a paradigm scenario of fright is suddenly being attacked by a dangerous predator. However, “adrenaline junkies” often react to situations closely resembling this with glee instead of fright; consider surfers thrilled rather than frightened by the sudden approach of a thirty-foot wave. Furthermore, using paradigm scenarios to justify emotion-type identifications does not adequately take into account the fact that what caused an emotional feeling is  See de Sousa (1987) for a discussion of paradigm scenarios.

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not always what the emotion is about. For instance, when you tenderly express your love for me, I might know quite well that you are presenting me with a paradigm scenario for my feeling affection toward you. However, if my character is—perhaps unbeknownst to me—somewhat vicious, your tender expression may elicit in me only an emotion of happiness that I can now take advantage of you. In this case, what my happiness is about (that I can now take advantage of you) is quite different from what a feeling of affection would have been about (your tenderness). But, given the qualitative similarity of happiness and affection, if I happen to at least implicitly accept the popular (but mistaken)21 view that what an emotion is about is necessarily what the subject takes to have caused it, I may fail to even notice what my emotion is actually about, and focus instead on the scenario that I correctly take to have caused it. This may result in my erroneously believing that my happiness that I can now take advantage of you is an emotion of affection for your tenderness. That is, in such a case I might get wrong both my emotion’s type and that which it is about. It might here be objected that an emotion’s type is never to be inferred directly from its cause’s resemblance to a paradigm scenario, but rather from how its cause has been evaluatively appraised by the subject. So if I am in fact feeling happy that I can now take advantage of you, that emotion must have been caused by my appraising your tenderness as an opportunity to exploit you, rather than as a gesture worthy of my affection. However, this raises the question of the extent to which we are aware of the appraisals that may cause our emotions. According to many emotion theorists, such appraisals are seldom consciously and cognitively articulated by the subject; rather, they usually occur automatically and unconsciously. Indeed, “affect-program” theorists argue that the proper function of an emotion is to prepare the subject to react to the causal event more quickly than any consciously articulated cognitive appraisal would allow.22 In a similar vein, Jesse Prinz (2004) argues that in most cases the 21  The view that what an emotion is about is necessarily what the subject takes to have caused it is fairly widespread among emotion theorists. For instance, Damasio (1994: 161) seems to accept the view as a matter of psychological necessity. Prinz (2004: 62) appears to accept it as a matter of semantic necessity. Lazarus (1991) and other causal-evaluative appraisal theorists at least implicitly accept it when they hold that an emotion’s type is determined by the subject’s appraisal of its cause, and that the resulting evaluative judgment remains a sustaining part of the emotion (providing it with direction). See Herzberg (2009) for an extended argument that the view is mistaken. 22  Cf. Griffiths (1997) for a defense of affect program theories.

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a­ utomatically occurring emotional feeling just is the evaluative appraisal. Such a view perhaps ensures that the subject is aware of the relevant appraisal (since the appraisal just is the feeling), but it resurrects the problems already discussed about attempting to infer an emotion’s type from its qualitative properties alone. If my happiness case seems too far-fetched or pathological to be convincing, the same points can be illustrated using a more normal case—one that does not require me to have an atypical emotional character, or to accept the view that one’s emotions are always about what one takes to be their causes. Suppose that I hear someone say something negative about you, and I am suddenly aware of feeling either anger or contempt (disdain) toward the speaker—two emotions that feel quite similar to me. If it is anger, I should probably count it as evidence that I love you, for, as I mentioned in the introduction, feeling anger in such circumstances is probably the manifestation of a “self-originating” disposition characteristic of love. Anger can have this status because it is properly directed at someone one appraises to have been unjustly offensive to oneself or to someone to whom one feels close, including family members, close friends, and lovers. Contempt, by contrast, is typically not felt on anyone’s behalf, and is directed toward those one appraises to be unimportant or unworthy due to their ineptitude, stupidity, or low social standing.23 Now, given that it is the speaker’s remark to which I am reacting in either case, I must try to determine whether I appraised the remark as unjustly offensive toward you (in which case I should infer that I am feeling angry at the speaker), or whether I appraised it merely as a sign of the speaker’s stupidity (in which case I should infer that I am feeling contempt toward the speaker). If immediately after hearing the remark but prior to experiencing the feeling I happened to have consciously thought, “That’s unjustifiably insulting to you,” I could perhaps strongly infer that my feeling is one of anger. But, as noted earlier, emotions are probably rarely caused by such consciously articulated appraisals. Of course, I could now deliberately re-appraise the remark, but there is no guarantee that this would have the same effect as 23  These characterizations of anger and contempt are drawn from Aristotle’s uses of the terms in Rhetoric (1954), Book II, chapter 2. The characterization of “anger” is also consistent with Lazarus’ (1991) “core relational theme” of anger: “A demeaning offense against me and mine”. Although some view contempt to be a blend of other emotions, I agree with Ekman (1999) that it is more likely a “basic” emotion that evolved to help us navigate through social hierarchies.

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the automatic, unconscious process that originally caused the emotion.24 So, even if inferences from appraisal type to emotion type are reliable, it can be difficult to determine the specific appraisal that actually caused one’s emotion, especially when the emotional feeling’s qualitative properties fail to disambiguate between relevant alternative emotion types.25 Finally, we also need to recognize that many people simply misconceptualize the types of their emotions because they have a less than perfect grasp on the relevant emotion concepts. For instance, many people appear not to understand the difference between jealousy and envy; in particular, they tend to misconceptualize feelings of envy as being feelings of jealousy. Such people are likely to say to someone who has bought something they covet, “I’m so jealous of you!” They may have forgotten, or never learned, the two emotions’ distinct analyses, jealousy being a response to a valued relationship being threatened by a third party, envy being a response to someone having something one wants. But if I tend to misconceptualize feelings of envy as feelings of jealousy, I may falsely believe that I have an emotional disposition characteristic of the sort of “ordinary love” Maurice feels toward Sarah in The End of the Affair. For instance, suppose that you have a close friendship with someone other than me that revolves around your mutual interest in playing tennis, a game for which I have no aptitude. I might then come to believe that I am jealous of your friend (and take my jealousy as a sign that I love you), when in fact I am merely envious of them for having an ability that enables the two of you to engage in a fun activity closed to the two of us. These are just a few of the ways in which one can be wrong about the types of one’s emotional feelings, particularly in regard to the feelings of love. I am not suggesting that in general the underlying processes are so unreliable that everyone always has sufficient reason to doubt that they experience love’s emotions toward another. Rather, my point is merely that some people under some psychological circumstances seem likely to form false beliefs that they emotionally love another, and so have sufficient reason to doubt that they do so (at least insofar as they are aware of the relevant circumstances). Let’s assume for the sake of further exploration 24  Multilevel appraisal theories contrast conscious, deliberate, cognitive appraisals with the automatic, unconscious appraisals made by the sub-personal emotional system. Doing so helps to explain phobic emotions, among other phenomena. Cf. Teasdale (1999) for a concise overview of such theories. 25  See Herzberg (2016) for my positive view of how we may be able to reliably identify the types of our emotions.

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that I am one of those people. Upon reflection, I’m unsure whether I love you or not, emotionally speaking; my confidence level that I tend to experience love’s emotions toward you is below 50%. Should I therefore doubt that I love you romantically? Perhaps, but let’s further suppose that I am no more confident that I usually do not experience love’s emotions toward you. In other words, I have insufficient evidence to justify either belief or doubt that I love you. This allows me to suspend both belief and doubt and to merely “entertain the hypothesis” that I love you, pending further evidence. However, to gain more evidence I need to remain close to you, so I consider whether to now make love’s commitments to you and to express my doing so by telling you that I love you. After all, in contrast to my feelings, whether I make commitments or not is entirely under my control, right? Admittedly, the love that results might be empty (commitment only) or at best fatuous (commitment and passion), but some “arranged marriages” provide evidence that what begins as empty or fatuous love can become romantic over time.26 So let’s suppose that I now exclaim “I love you!” sincerely believing that I am making love’s commitments to you. Does it follow that I am making those commitments to you, and hence that I love you in at least that limited way?

7.4   On Believing That I Am Making Love’s Commitments to You Unfortunately, not quite. But before I explain why, I need to be clearer about what I take to be the main commitments of romantic love—those that are implied by one’s sincerely stating “I love you” in a romantic context. Since in many cultures romantic love provides a good ground for marriage (“Because we love each other” being a perfectly acceptable answer to “Why are you getting married?”), and in many contemporary cultures such love might even be considered necessary for a successful marriage, marriage vows can provide some guidance here. Such vows often require the couple to pledge monogamous fidelity to each other, regardless of future circumstances.27 They also stress the intended irrevocability of marriage commitments at least until the death of one of the 26  See Sternberg (1986: 123). Remember that I am using “romantic” as Sternberg uses “consummate”, the type of love that requires adequate degrees of all three components. 27  For marriage vows from many religious traditions, see https://www.theknot.com/content/traditional-wedding-vows-from-various-religions (accessed 10/22/2020).

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spouses. Some also involve pledges to demonstrate such virtues as honesty, respect, and forgiveness toward one’s partner, which is reasonable insofar as the exercise of such virtues involves voluntary activity; one is not implausibly pledging to experience feelings over which one has little if any control. By contrast, non- or premarital romantic lovers usually are not committing to a lifelong relationship when they tell each other “I love you”, nor are they committing to share their lives with each other to the extent found in marriage; for example, they need not commit to cohabitation. However, telling someone that you romantically love them does imply that you intend the relationship to last for at least some time; in contrast to mere infatuation, romantically loving someone seems incompatible with intending merely to have a “one night stand” with them. Romantic lovers also implicitly commit themselves to being accessible to each other on an ongoing basis, in a way that resembles the “to have and to hold” clause of some marriage vows. More specifically, they commit themselves to being open to ongoing emotional intimacy and sexual activity (the other two components of romantic love), to a degree that exceeds mere sexual friendship, but which may fall short of what is expected in an ideal marriage. They also commit to a significant degree of practical dependability, to come to each other’s aid and to prioritize each other’s interests over those of their mere friends. They perhaps commit to being honest about any firm intentions they may form to discontinue the relationship. Finally, while two romantic lovers need not commit to romantically loving only each other, de facto “fidelity” typically results from the practical difficulty of maintaining with multiple partners the levels of emotional and sexual accessibility just mentioned.28 Importantly, the commitments one makes to one’s romantic partner, like those to one’s spouse, are addressed to their singular individuality; they are not conditional on one’s beloved’s maintaining inessential properties. As Shakespeare famously put it, “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.”29 By contrast, while one’s friends are certainly valued, they usually are valued for their properties. As a result, friends are interchangeable in a way that lovers are not. For instance, if one of my friends can no longer meet me for a hike, another friend who is equally competent 28  I do not rule out the possibility of polyamorous romance, but for simplicity’s sake I am concerned here with bilateral relations. 29  Shakespeare (2004), Sonnet 116. For some disagreement on this point, see Rorty (1986/1993).

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at hiking (and perhaps at conversing) will do just as well. Similarly, if one is merely sexually attracted to someone, one should be equally attracted to their identical twin as well, ceteris paribus. Indeed, if one were not so attracted to each twin, one might reasonably be viewed as inexplicably fickle. But there is nothing similarly incoherent about romantically loving one twin but not the other, and this can be explained by the fact that love’s commitments are addressed to the singular individual who is loved.30 This also helps to explain the exceptional degree of value most people place on being loved, as opposed to merely being admired for their properties or their accomplishments. For they understand that through another’s love, their singular individuality is recognized and affirmed in a way not found in other forms of relationship. Also, the exceptional degree of value one places on being loved in this way explains why many spouses and romantic lovers would prefer their partners to have casual sex with a stranger rather than with a sexual friend with whom they may share an emotional intimacy, and with a sexual friend over a competing lover to whom they may be committed. For those other forms of relationship are less threatening to the commitments that hold between spouses or romantic lovers qua singular individuals. Finally, none of this entails that one’s emotional and passionate responses to another’s properties play no role in helping one to select a lover. The fact that your particular properties trigger in me certain positive feelings may well be why I decide to address love’s commitments to your singular individuality rather than to someone else’s, even though everyone is a singular individual. But although one’s emotional and sexual responses to another’s properties help to explain romantic love’s selectivity, an important function of commitment is precisely to transcend the relative shallowness of such selectivity. Mutual commitment plays another important role in romantic relationships: it allows the lovers to form a union that amounts to a merging or interlinking of their interests. For if I value your commitments to me (which I should, given my desire to be loved and willingness to be loved by you), I thereby have an interest in your maintaining your commitment to me. My recognition of this interest should motivate me to make and maintain a reciprocal commitment to you that you similarly value and recognize, providing you with an interest in my maintaining my commitment to you. I should then also value the maintenance of my commitment to 30  This is what philosophers mean when they observe that love is not “fungible”. See, for instance, de Sousa (1987).

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you at least insofar as it acts as a means of maintaining your commitment to me, and vice versa.31 Of course, each of us may also have an independent interest in our commitments to each other, insofar as we each desire to love in addition to desiring to be loved. But commitments motivated only by a desire to love would not require any relationship, and hence would be unlikely to generate one. Finally, mere mutuality of affect (be it passionate or emotional) seems unlikely to generate a stable relationship or merging of interests, since one’s passions can be satisfied—and one’s emotions can be elicited—by anyone with the relevant properties. So it seems that only mutual commitments addressed to each other’s singular individuality and motivated by each partner’s desire to be loved can create the sort of interest-­merging that results in the maintenance of a loving relationship. Note that once this interlinkage of interests is in place, each lover also has a stake in helping their beloved pursue whatever interests they may have external to the relationship, insofar as their doing so should strengthen the other’s commitment to them, and as a result their commitment to the other.32 Let’s now return to our epistemological question: does it follow from my merely believing that I am making love’s commitments to you that I am making them? Is this an aspect of loving about which doubt is always unreasonable? As I stated earlier, not quite. For even if any commitment I make is entirely under my control, it does not follow that any belief I have that I am now making love’s commitments to you must be true. What may make it seem otherwise is the conceptual truth that one voluntarily makes a commitment if and only if one knows that one is doing so. Call this “C”. It follows trivially from the truth condition of knowledge that if one knows that one is making a commitment, then one is doing so. And it follows from the definition of “voluntarily” that if one voluntarily makes a commitment, then one knows that one is doing so. For one cannot voluntarily do anything without knowing what one is doing. To put this somewhat 31  This is consistent with Robert Solomon’s observation that the “grand reason” to love “is because we bring out the best in each other” (1988: 155). My love for you brings out the best in me insofar as I want to be the best person I can be in your eyes in order to reinforce your commitment to me, and vice versa. 32  Notice that on this account of commitment and interest-merging in a romantic relationship, the merger does not generate a new “we-entity” separate from each of the lovers’ singular individualities. See Helm (2017) for discussion of such views. Rather, on my analysis, it is essential that each lover maintain their autonomous ability to withdraw their commitment to the other.

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differently, any voluntary act implicates the agent; this is why one can always be held responsible for one’s voluntary actions, including one’s commitment-makings. Finally, since one cannot make a commitment without knowing that one is doing so, and one cannot know that one is doing so without justifiably believing that one is doing so (since knowing entails justifiably believing), the beliefs that are partly constitutive of acts of commitment-making are both justified and made true by those acts themselves. However, little of epistemological importance follows from C. For like all conceptual truths, C fails to settle any non-conceptual factual issues. In particular, it does not follow from C that just any belief I may have that I am making a commitment is true, for such a belief might be produced in any number of ways other than by my commitment-making. For instance, a sufficiently crafty neurologist might implant such a belief in me despite it being false. Or, more realistically, I may hold the belief as a result of hypnosis, or I might form such a belief due to wishful thinking or the two potential sources of bias discussed earlier. In other words, C does not provide me with any means for discriminating true beliefs that I am making a commitment from false beliefs that I am doing so. Someone might here object that there is no need to discriminate true from false beliefs that one is making a commitment, because to believe that one is making a commitment just is to make the commitment. Indeed, the objector might claim, merely uttering the words “I hereby make this commitment” makes it so. The objector’s strategy here is to assimilate commitment-­making to a merely performative analysis of promising. On such an analysis, if I say to you, “I promise to have dinner with you tomorrow,” my saying the words makes it true that I have promised to have dinner with you tomorrow. It does not matter whether I am stating the words sincerely or not. Indeed, even if I am being thoroughly deceptive when I say “I promise you…”, I nevertheless have made the promise to you. If commitment-making is similarly performative, then my merely saying “I am making love’s commitments to you” is criterial of my having made those commitments. So if I merely say to you “I love you”, understanding the commitments that love requires, I thereby in fact love you (at least in Sternberg’s empty sense). But surely that is not the case. Rather, the truth of my words depends on whether I am willfully making love’s commitments to you—that is, on whether I am forming an intention to keep those commitments (even if that intention goes unfulfilled). So if the objector were to insist that promising and commitment-making must share a single analysis, I would argue that we should give up the performative analysis of

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promising in favor of a volitional one, rather than give up the volitional analysis of commitment-making in favor of a performative one.33 However, the epistemological problem of how I can tell my true from my false beliefs that I am making a commitment may not be as serious as it appears, for two reasons. First, it seems likely that there is a phenomenological difference between my believing that I am making a commitment when my will is engaged versus my so believing when my will is not engaged. That is, there seems to be a feeling of resolve that accompanies the making of a commitment, and perhaps I can reliably tell when that feeling is present or absent. Note that resting the ability to tell true from false beliefs that I am making a commitment on my being able to correctly identify a feeling of resolve need not open up a can of worms similar to the ones that supplied reasons to doubt that I was feeling love’s emotions. For in the emotional cases, the problems all involved the difficulty of discriminating between different types of emotion that felt qualitatively similar, while in the commitment case there seems not to be different types of willing that could feel qualitatively similar. Secondly, and more importantly, even if I do not know how I can reliably distinguish true from false beliefs that I am making a commitment, it does not follow that I cannot in fact do so, and so my mere lack of knowledge in this regard does not provide me with a positive reason to doubt that I can distinguish them. This second point can be further elaborated by noting an epistemological principle that applies to both beliefs about one’s commitment-makings and beliefs about the types of one’s emotions: absent good reason for judging such propositions to be false, one is justified in accepting them as true “by default”. In this respect, introspectively and reflectively produced beliefs resemble perceptually produced beliefs about the presence and types of physical objects in the world.34 Both are similarly “foundational”, epistemologically speaking.35 If I perceptually believe that there is a cat on the mat, I am justified in believing that proposition unless my default 33  The paradigm of a performative practice is the “christening” or naming of a ship: exclaiming, for instance, “I hereby christen this ship the Santa Maria!” Such a paradigm seems quite distant from the practice of promising. 34  Note that this claim does not require that we view mental states as otherwise analogous to physical objects, nor does it require introspectively and perceptually formed beliefs to have default justifications of the same type or strength. This foundational sort of justification can, of course, be supplemented by a belief’s consistency and coherence—and defeated by its inconsistency and incoherence—with other beliefs. 35  See, for instance, Audi (2002) for his version of fallibilistic foundationalism.

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justification for it is defeated by some good reason to think it is false, such as that my perceptual or cognitive abilities are malfunctioning due to unfavorable conditions of some sort. Similarly, if I introspectively believe that I am making love’s commitments to you, I am justified in believing that proposition unless my default justification for it is defeated by some good reason to think it is false, such as that my introspective and cognitive abilities are malfunctioning or are biased by the sorts of factors mentioned in “On Believing That I Love You: Two Potential Sources of Bias”. The same point applies to my introspectively produced beliefs that I am experiencing a particular type of emotion toward you, only in this case there potentially are additional reasons for doubt of the sort outlined in “On Believing That I Am Experiencing Love’s Emotions Toward You”. It is important to stress that only beliefs produced primarily by foundational processes like introspection and perception can enjoy this sort of default justification, and that such justification certainly does not guarantee that the believed propositions are true. However, it does rule out one’s being justified in doubting the same propositions at the same time (absent some evidence of their falsity). Of course, even when one is justified in believing that one is making love’s commitments, one cannot be similarly justified in believing that one will remain committed between those acts of commitment-making, nor can one be similarly justified in believing that one will keep the commitments one has made. For such predictive beliefs can be justified only by inference from what one justifiably believes about one’s own history, and in this way they are similar to the beliefs one might have about one’s beloved’s ability to keep their commitments. In many cases, the more one knows about the relevant history, the more reasonable it may be to doubt that a commitment will be kept. Ideally, making a commitment establishes a disposition to behave consistently with its content until the commitment has been revoked by the agent. But given the less-than-perfect reliability with which such dispositions operate, as well as the fact that psychological dispositions are not directly observable and can be inferred only through observations of their manifestations, the best evidence I may have that I remain committed might be behaviors that others could observe and assess at least as reliably as I. So as long as I keep in mind that my overt expressions of love could be misleading, others’ estimations of my character might provide me with a valuable “reality check” on the nagging question of whether my love is true.

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7.5   Concluding Remarks Although we have merely scratched the surface of the conceptual and psychological aspects of romantic love and the epistemological issues related to justifiably believing or doubting that one loves another, it seems safe at this point to draw a few conclusions. To begin with, one can certainly be wrong about whether one romantically loves another. That is, one’s beliefs on this matter are clearly fallible. However, fallibility does not by itself entail dubitability. One is justified in believing that one loves another unless one has good reason to doubt the reliability of one’s introspective, reflective, or inferential processes, and the potential reasons for doubt can vary from person to person, case to case, and target only propositions about one having particular components of love, some of which seem more readily dubitable than others. We can now order by their relative dubitability the propositions that must be true about one’s passions, emotions, and commitments toward another in order for one to romantically love them. First, one may be best situated to justifiably judge whether one is experiencing passionate feelings of sexual attraction to another, thanks to their distinctive qualitative profiles, which can be explained by the particular bodily conditions they register. There may also be other subjectively observable mental signs of sexual arousal and attraction, such as distinctive forms of attention, perceptual focus, and imagery, which we cannot delve into here. So whatever doubts one may have that one is experiencing feelings of sexual attraction toward another are probably rarely justified. Secondly, one appears to be fairly well-situated to justifiably judge whether one is making love’s commitments to another, at least if there is a distinctive feeling of resolve produced by the engagement of one’s will that allows one to tell when one is really making a commitment. If such feelings exist, identifying them should at least not fall prey to the sorts of problems that can diminish one’s ability to recognize one’s emotional feelings. After all, there is presumably only one type of feeling of resolve that can be produced by willing, unlike the many types of qualitatively similar emotional feelings that can be produced by a wide variety of situations with a number of potentially emotion-eliciting properties. On the other hand, unlike emotional feelings, feelings of resolve seem not to be associated with the sorts of publicly observable “paradigm scenarios” that may facilitate one’s ability to conceptualize or linguistically label one’s emotional feelings (despite the problems that can arise when inferring emotion type from scenario

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type). So the epistemological usefulness of feelings of resolve remains somewhat indeterminate, and here we may have to rely on the general principle that introspectively produced beliefs are justified absent good reasons for doubting their contents, such as reasons to believe that the potentially biasing factors outlined in “On Believing That I Love You: Two Potential Sources of Bias” are operative. Finally, it seems clear that one is least well-situated to justifiably judge whether one is experiencing love’s emotional feelings toward another, given the many ways one can misconceptualize their types outlined in “On Believing That I Am Experiencing Love’s Emotions Toward You”, in addition to the two potential sources of bias. But here again, one’s introspectively produced beliefs about the types of one’s emotional feelings are justified by default, absent good reasons to think that their contents are false. I can now explain why Maurice is not necessarily right to suggest that doubt is always avoidable when loving in Sarah’s extraordinary way and always unavoidable when loving in his own ordinary way. For even if Sarah loves only in the present, she could still have justified doubts about the types of her emotions and even about the truth of her apparent commitment-­making. She might be insensitive to feelings of resolve, or her will may not produce them with sufficient intensity, or she may be biased by her sexual attraction to Maurice or by her intense desire to be romantically loved. Indeed, the only sort of doubt that Sarah may always be able to avoid is about commitment-keeping, insofar as she is unconcerned with the future. Of course, one may wonder whether she can make any commitment at all, given that she loves entirely in the present, and commitments are essentially future-directed. But Sarah’s way of loving is not incoherent; it merely represents a compromise with human imperfection. As we have noted, no commitment’s making can guarantee its being kept; any commitment can be revoked for good reason, irrational influences on one’s will can result in inconsistent willings, and psychological dispositions to behave in various ways are not fail-safe. Sarah, like anyone else, can make a commitment by forming the necessary intention to keep it in the future, without being concerned about keeping it in the future. Maurice, by contrast, can experience only the sort of ordinary love that breeds resentment and hatred when its commitments are unexpectedly revoked, and insecurity or jealousy even when they are kept. Perhaps the best he can do when Sarah proclaims her extraordinary love for him is not to deny the value of her commitment-making at the moment it occurs, however justified his concerns may be about her ability to keep it. Of

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course, when he loves in his ordinary way, he will probably be more prone to doubts about all of love’s components. His anxiety about the future may undermine his ability to experience love’s emotional and passionate feelings in the present, even when he may have been able to feel them otherwise. Similarly, the doubts generated by his perhaps justifiable anxiety might themselves interfere with his ability to experience love, and so become self-fulfilling. However, not everyone who can love only in Maurice’s ordinary way must meet such an unhappy fate. If one is lucky, one’s history might provide no strong grounds for doubt, one might be able to counterbalance anxiety with hope, and one might have no good reason to ever doubt that one is experiencing love’s feelings. In the end, despite the causal relations that can occur between them, what may be most important to recognize is the fundamental independence of our passions, emotions, and commitments from whatever beliefs or doubts we may form about them. It is one thing to love, and quite another to believe or doubt that one loves. As long as we keep that firmly in mind, our doubts are at least less likely to interfere with our loves.

References Aristotle. 1954. Rhetoric. Trans. Rhys Roberts. New York: Modern Library. Audi, R. 2002. The Foundationalism-Coherentism Controversy: Hardened Stereotypes and Overlapping Theories. In Knowledge & Inquiry, ed. W.B. Wray, 83–127. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Chalmers, D. 2003. The Content and Epistemology of Phenomenal Belief. In Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Q.  Smith and A.  Jokic, 220–272. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Damasio, A. 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. New York: Avon Books. Damasio, A. 2004. William James and The Modern Neurobiology of Emotion. In Emotion, Evolution, and Rationality, eds. D. Evans and P. Cruse, 3–13. New York: Oxford University Press (USA). Davenport, J. 2007. Will as Commitment and Resolve. New  York: Fordham University Press. De Sousa, R. 1987. The Rationality of Emotion. Cambridge, MA: MIT/Bradford. ———. 2015. Love – A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Deonna, J., Teroni, F. 2012. The Emotions – A Philosophical Introduction, London: Routledge. Ekman, P. 1999. Basic Emotions. In Handbook of Cognition and Emotion, ed. T. Dalgleish and M. Power, 45–60. Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Fehr, Beverley. 1988. Prototype Analysis of the Concepts of Love and Commitment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 55 (4): 557–579. Ferreira, J.M. 2015. Willing and the Necessities of Love in Frankfurt and Kierkegaard. In Love, Reason, and Will: Kierkegaard After Frankfurt, ed. A. Rudd and J. Davenport, 197–216. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Frankfurt, H. 1999. Autonomy, Necessity, and Love. In Necessity, Volition, and Love, 129–141. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2004. The Reasons of Love. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gertler, B. 2001. Introspecting Phenomenal States. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LXIII (2): 305–328. Greene, G. 1951. The End of the Affair. New York: Penguin Books. Griffiths, P. 1997. What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Helm, B. 2017. Love. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N.  Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/love. Accessed 22 October 2020. Herzberg, L. A. 2009. Direction, Causation, and Appraisal Theories of Emotion. Philosophical Psychology 22 (2): 167–186. ———. 2012. To Blend or to Compose: A Debate About Emotion Structure. In Dynamicity in Emotion Concepts, ed. P.A.  Wilson, 73–94. Lodz: Studies in Language 27, Frankfurt a. Main: Peter Lang. ———. 2016. On Knowing How I Feel About That: A Process-Reliabilist Analysis. Acta Analytica 31 (4): 419–438. ———. 2018. Can Emotional Feelings Represent Significant Relations?. Acta Analytica, 34 (2): 215–234. ———. 2019. On Sexual Lust as an Emotion. Humana.Mente Journal of Philosophical Studies 35: 271–302. Lazarus, R.S. 1991. Emotion and Adaptation. New York: Oxford University Press. Prinz, J. 2004. Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion. New York: Oxford University Press. Rorty, A.O. 1986/1993. The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love Is Not Love Which Alters Not When It Alteration Finds. In Friendship: A Philosophical Reader, ed. N.K. Badhwar, 91–107. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Shakespeare, W. 2004. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Eds. B.A.  Mowat and P.  Werstine. New York: The Folger Shakespeare Library. ———. 2014. Romeo and Juliet. Revised 4th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Solomon, R. 1988. About Love: Reinventing Romance for Our Times. New York: Simon & Schuster. Sternberg, R.J. 1986. A Triangular Theory of Love. Psychological Review 93 (2): 119–135.

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———. 1988. Triangulating Love. In The Psychology of Love, ed. R.J.  Sternberg and Michael L. Barnes, 119–138. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1997. Construct Validation of a Triangular Love Scale. European Journal of Social Psychology 27: 313–335. Teasdale, J.D. 1999. Multi-Level Theories of Cognition-Emotion Relations. In Handbook of Cognition and Emotion, ed. T. Dalgleish and M. Power, 665–681. Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Wittgenstein, L. 1922/1961. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. New  York: Routledge Classics.

CHAPTER 8

Love and Free Agency Ishtiyaque Haji

8.1   Introduction In this chapter, I motivate and explain the significance of the view that love is historical in a sense of “historical” to be explained. I argue that love’s historicity exposes its freedom presuppositions. These, in turn, render love fragile insofar as lack of free agency compromises love, lovable behavior, or relationships of love.

8.2   Responsibility and History To get a handle on the relevant concept of historicity, it will be instructive to start with a prominent consideration in favor of moral responsibility being historical. On a customary understanding of moral responsibility, an agent being morally responsible for performing an intentional action entails that she deserves some moral credit (e.g., praise) or discredit (e.g., blame) for that action. Various conditions of moral responsibility—agency and control (or freedom) conditions, for instance—cannot be specified independently of invoking elements of a person’s psychology, such as apt

I. Haji (*) University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Cushing (ed.), New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72324-8_8

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beliefs and desires. Call such elements “responsibility-grounding mental elements” and dub conditions of responsibility that essentially appeal to these elements “responsibility’s psychology implicating conditions.” Responsibility historicism (or externalism) is the thesis that the psychology implicating conditions of moral responsibility cannot be specified independently of facts about how the person acquired her responsibility-­ grounding mental elements. The salient idea is that facts about one’s history or past that bear on the acquisition of one’s responsibility-­ grounding mental elements can influence whether one’s actions are free and, hence, are pertinent to whether one can be morally responsible for them. Responsibility anti-historicism (or internalism) is the denial of responsibility externalism. In the free will literature, various vignettes involving surreptitious psychological manipulation provide strong impetus for responsibility historicism. In a case Alfred Mele advances, Chuck is morally responsible for making himself a merciless bully of vulnerable people. He stalks and kills a homeless man, Don (Mele 2019: 19–20).1 Sally, in contrast, works hard at and succeeds in becoming one of the kindest, gentlest people on Earth, and she is morally responsible for doing so. In case One Bad Day, Sally awakes with a desire to stalk and kill a neighbor, George… What happened is that, while Sally slept, a team of psychologists that had discovered the system of values that make Chuck tick implanted those values in Sally after erasing her competing values. They did this while leaving her memory intact, which helps account for her surprise… Seeing nothing that she regards as a good reason to refrain from stalking and killing George, provided that she can get away with it, Sally devises a plan for killing him; and she executes it—and him—that afternoon… When Sally falls asleep at the end of her horrible day, the manipulators undo everything they had done to her. When she awakes the next day, she is just as sweet as ever and she has no memory of the murder. (Mele 2019: 20–21)2

Mele judges that whereas Chuck is morally responsible for his killings, he “cannot help but see Sally as too much a victim of external forces to be morally responsible for killing George” (Mele 2019: 21–22).3 I agree.4  See also, Mele 2006: 171, 2016: 73.  See also Mele 2006: 171–172, 2016: 73–74. 3  See also Mele 2006: 172, 2016: 75–76. 4  See, for example, Haji 1998: 15–22, 2009: 61–67, 2013; Haji and Cuypers 2008: 15–41. 1 2

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This judgment is plausible even if it were not human manipulators but some non-agential external force, a weird substance in the atmosphere, or an interplay of Sally’s genetic profile and environmental factors that brought about the radical change in Sally. If you concur with this judgment, you should find responsibility externalism plausible. You should be pretty convinced that how you acquire your responsibility-grounding mental elements can make a difference to whether you’re morally praiseworthy or blameworthy for your pertinent choices or bodily actions.

8.3   Love and History Is love historical? It would seem that whether it is depends partly on the nature of love. Central to some of the competing accounts of love are desires. For example, Harry Frankfurt submits that lovers identify the interests of their beloveds as their own; love is concerned with the well-­ being and flourishing of the beloved object. The good of the beloved is desired for its own sake rather than for the sake of promoting other interests (Frankfurt 1999: 165–166). Stressing motivation, Frankfurt also maintains that love is “essentially a somewhat non-voluntary and complex volitional structure that bears both upon how a person is disposed to act and upon how he is disposed to manage the motivations and interests by which he is moved” (Frankfurt 1999: 165). Derk Pereboom affirms that “love of another involves, most fundamentally, wishing well for the other, taking on many of the aims and desires of the other as one’s own, and a desire to be together with the other” (Pereboom 2001: 202). Harvey Green submits that love involves a desire to share an association with the beloved, and that the “basic desire for association motivates and sets parameters for the desire for the good of the one who is loved” (Green 1997: 217).5 In other accounts of love, emotions figure centrally. Niko Kolodny tenders that love essentially involves “emotional vulnerability.” He explains: To say that A is emotionally vulnerable to B…is to say, in part, that A is disposed to have a range of favorable emotions in response to A’s beliefs that 5  Indeed, Green’s position is stronger. Regarding romantic love, he claims that A loves B if, and only if, A desires to share an association with B which typically includes a sexual dimension, A desires that B fare well for his or her own sake, and A desires that B reciprocate the desires for association and welfare (Green 1997: 216).

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B…has fared or will fare well, and a range of unfavorable emotions in response to A’s beliefs that B…has fared or will fare poorly. For example, A may feel content when B is well, elated when B meets with unexpected good luck, anxious when it seems that B may come to harm, grief-stricken when B does. (Notice that A is not simply emotionally vulnerable to how B treats A, although this is often what is meant by saying that one person is “emotionally vulnerable” to another.) (Kolodny 2003: 152)

In his complex Kantian analysis of love, David Velleman emphasizes that love disarms our emotional defenses, making us vulnerable to others. When we love someone, “we are responding to the value that he possesses by virtue of being a person or, as Kant would say, an instance of rational nature” (Velleman 1999: 365). Following Kant, Velleman claims that the value of a person is different in kind from the value of other things: “a person has a dignity, whereas other things have a price” (Velleman 1999: 364). The distinction between dignity and price corresponds to the distinction between ends that consist in possible results of action and ends that are “self-existent.” The former, Velleman says, are objects of preference and choice and are comparative. The latter are not produced by action, and their value does not serve as grounds for comparing them with alternatives but as grounds for revering or respecting them as they already are. This value is incomparable in that “it calls for a response to the object [that has this value] in itself, not in comparison with others” (p.  364). Love, then, is a response to (as a result of being aware of) the incomparable value possessed by a person in virtue of the person being a self-­ existent end. Velleman further proposes that love is an arresting awareness of such value. It is so in that, in responding to the incomparable value of a person in the manner constitutive of love, our defenses against being emotionally affected by the other are lifted (pp.  361, 366). Velleman explains that conceiving of love as a response to a person’s rational nature may seem odd if “rational nature” is taken to denote the intellect. But rational nature, he says, is not the intellect. Rather, it is a capacity of valuation: “a capacity to care about things in that reflective way which is distinctive of self-conscious creatures like us” (p. 366). We are invited to think of a person’s rational nature as his core of reflective concern (pp. 366–367). What we respond to, then, in loving a person, is the value that the person has in virtue of being a person. This value “inheres” in the capacity persons have to appreciate the value of self-existent ends or, in other words, the capacity

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persons have for loving others. So according to Velleman, “what we respond to, in loving people, is their capacity to love: it’s just another way of saying that what our hearts respond to is another heart” (p. 365). Since, in loving another, we respond to their capacity to love us, we suspend our emotional defenses against them: [L]ove for others is possible when we find in them a capacity for valuation like ours, which can be constrained by respect for ours, and which therefore makes our emotional defenses against them feel unnecessary. That’s why our capacity for valuation, when facing instances of itself, feels able to respond in the manner constitutive of love, by suspending our emotional defenses. Love, like respect, is the heart’s response to the realization that it is not alone. (Velleman 1999: 366, note omitted)

Proponents of yet other competing accounts emphasize that part of the complex state or condition of love is characteristically trust between the lover and the beloved. Laurence Thomas, for example, claims that a distinguishing mark of friendship—and by extension, love—is the bond of mutual trust between friends. This, he thinks, “is cemented by equal self-­ disclosure and for that very reason, is a sign of the very special regard which each has for the other” (Thomas 1987: 217). Dean Cocking and Jeanette Kennett take issue with Thomas’ proposal that self-disclosure— the confiding of private or intimate information—between friends cements bonds of mutual trust. But they agree that trust and intimacy are central to friendship (Cocking and Kennett 1998). Armed with these disparate proposed accounts of love’s nature, we may attempt to galvanize the view that love is historical in the same fashion in which many have tried to show that responsibility is historical: invoke appropriate radical reversal cases. Preliminarily, keep in mind that nothing in principle precludes manipulators of the sort we find in One Bad Day from (1) implanting into unsuspecting agents desires of various sorts including those (if any) fundamental to love; (2) making such agents emotionally vulnerable to others or seeing to it that they disarm their emotional defenses against others; (3) ensuring that such agents trust others; or (4) duplicating in such agents the complex volitional structure of the sort Frankfurt theorizes is central to love. Briefly, pick the feature that you deem central to love. It looks as though any such feature can be covertly reproduced in unsuspecting agents.

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Would an aptly developed radical reversal case affect our pertinent judgments of love? Let’s see. To develop such a case, first, attend more carefully to the notion of an agent’s values. An agent values something at a time if, and only, if at that time she desires and believes it to be good (Mele 2019: 14–15). Values, as psychological states, have both these dimensions. An action expresses a value only if this value (or its neural realizer) plays an appropriate causal role in its production. Now, for the case, assume that a cluster of values, VLuv, is fundamental to love. Romeo, but not Romello, loves Juliet. Having examined what makes Romeo tick, the manipulators implant in Romello Romeo’s VLuv values, and make other necessary changes in Romello so that he is relevantly just like Romeo in One Lovely Day—he now (supposedly) loves Juliet. By late evening, Romello reverts to his former self, showing little interest in Juliet. During the day, does Romello indeed love Juliet? One option is that he does not because the provenance of VLuv matters. Since Romello does not acquire, maintain, or endorse (in some suitable sense of “endorse”) VLuv on the basis of his pre-manipulated values for which he was largely responsible— since he is not the “ultimate originator” of VLuv—he does not love Juliet. In favor of this option, the judgment that manipulated Sally (M-Sally) is not morally blameworthy for killing George in One Bad Day is highly plausible. However, assuming that it is morally wrong for pre-manipulated Sally to kill George, it is not credible that, in virtue of being manipulated, it is no longer wrong for M-Sally to kill George. Elsewhere, to account partially for the asymmetry in these judgments—the engineered change in Sally’s values affects our appraisal of moral responsibility but not of moral obligation—I have suggested that appraisals of obligation are, first and foremost, appraisals of what agents do—they are “act-focused,” rather than appraisals of the agents themselves—they are not “agent-focused.” With responsibility, or agent-focused appraisals more generally, the agent is of paramount significance; her desires, beliefs, and values—her mental repertoire—must be “unequivocally attributable” to her because she is the primary object of evaluation (Frankfurt 2002: 27). This is not so with act-­ focused assessments of obligation. Imagine that a button in a hotel suite in New York must be pressed to save millions of lives in Asia; it is morally obligatory, at some time, for someone that she presses the button at this time, no matter who this person is and no matter what her psychology—it could be Michael, Bob, or Dana, however psychologically different they may be. Roughly, the idea is that evaluations of obligation pay relatively little heed to the sort of person you are, whereas those of responsibility do.

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Perhaps, love is pertinently like responsibility and unlike obligation in this respect. The agent who loves is deeply implicated in a way that, owing to her profound “investment” in love, it is reasonable to judge that in radical reversal cases such as One Lovely Day, the manipulated agent, like Romello, does not love Juliet. On the competing option—Romello does love Juliet in One Lovely Day—one might take an internalist’s stance on love, analogous to the stance Frankfurt takes on responsibility. If someone does something because he wants to do it, and if he has no reservations about that desire but is wholeheartedly behind it, then—so far as his moral responsibility for doing it is concerned—it really does not matter how he got that way. One further requirement must be added…: the person’s desires and attitudes have to be relatively well integrated into his general psychic condition. Otherwise they are not genuinely his…. As long as their interrelations imply that they are unequivocally attributable to him…. it makes no difference—so far as evaluating his moral responsibility is concerned—how he came to have them. (2002: 27)

One may opt for the view that just as the sort of manipulation in One Bad Day fails to let Sally off the hook—one is a staunch responsibility internalist—so the sort of homologous manipulation in One Lovely Day fails to undermine the judgment that Romello does, indeed, love Juliet.6 I have leanings toward the first option. I leave it to you, the reader, to decide which of the two options you find more tenable. We may now unearth an important first result. Even if the second option has the upper hand, it is highly credible to regard Romello’s love in One Lovely Day as forced, artificial, or ersatz. We value love in that we are favorably disposed to and judge or believe it to be good. Assuming Romello loves Juliet in One Lovely Day, this sort of ersatz love isn’t the sort of love we value. It is “free love” and not the kind of contrived love we find in One Lovely Day that we cherish. Agency can be manifest, for instance, in performing intentional actions, reacting with feelings or emotions, or expressing love. Radical reversal cases bring into stark relief the value of autonomous agency. We don’t esteem being the sort of agent whose intentional actions are solely the product of covert manipulation, roughly, because our agency is hijacked. 6  Other responsibility internalists or those with leanings toward responsibility internalism include Double (1991) and Watson (1999).

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Analogously, if we evince various feelings or express love only because we have been aptly manipulated or conditioned, presumably we would not value this manifestation of heteronomous agency.

8.4   Love’s Requirements and Acting from Love One Lovely Day helps to reveal another somewhat related result having to do not with love itself but with lovable behavior. The distinction between acting in accordance with moral duty (or obligation) and acting from duty is commonplace. Imagine that on some occasion you perform an act that issues from your desire to amass long-term financial gain, moral considerations do not figure at all in the proximal causal history of this action, and you rightly believe that you act from prudential reasons. Suppose that your act coincides with what you are morally required to do on this occasion. Here, you have acted in accordance with, but not from, duty. Similarly, we may distinguish between acting in accordance with or from love. Several writers have plausibly proposed that there are requirements and prohibitions from love’s standpoint. Frankfurt remarks: It is characteristic of our experience of loving that when we love something, there are certain things that we feel we must do. Love demands of us that we support and advance the well-being of our beloved, as circumstances make it possible and appropriate for us to do so; and it forbids us to injure our beloved, or to neglect its interests. If we disregard these demands and prohibitions, we feel that we are behaving badly—that we are betraying our love. Now the grip and forcefulness of the requirements that love imposes upon us resemble the forcefulness and grip of moral obligation. In cases of both sorts—those involving love and those involving duty—it seems to us that we are not free simply to do as we please or as we wish; love and duty alike generate in us a sense that we have no choice but to do what they require. (1999: 170)

Roger Lamb proposes that as a lover, you are obligated from love’s standpoint to attend to requests of the beloved, help the beloved, be concerned with the welfare of the beloved, and defend the trust that is partly constitutive of your love (Lamb 1997: 28–29). Acting from love is central to loving relationships, and to act from love, one must be moved by love.7 If there is some sort of externalist constraint 7

 See, for example, Pettit 1997: 155–156.

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on love—if, in this way, love is historical—then acts that are tokens of acting out of love will be indirectly historical too. Behavior that is loving behavior must stem from the nuances or cares of love. When one loves another, one is typically concerned for the other. The concern may express itself in sundry ways, many behavioral. Insofar as the behavior that expresses the concern is genuinely loving behavior, it seems that what is done to manifest the concern must appropriately causally stem from love and not, for example, from moral duty or prudence. I previously proposed that in One Lovely Day, credibly, manipulated Romello does not love Juliet. If so, his relevant behavior which would, in the absence of manipulation, be lovable behavior, is not lovable behavior because it is not motivated by love. Against this verdict, one may insist that even in the throes of manipulation Romello does love Juliet, and hence his relevant behavior is lovable behavior because it issues from love. However, the love here is ersatz love, and acting from ersatz love is, again, not the sort of lovable behavior we value. A third lesson of the discussion on radical reversal cases and love is that there is a sense in which love is fragile. Love has freedom or autonomy presuppositions, and when these are undermined either love is undermined too or it isn’t the sort of love that is valued. Again, in virtue of being aptly manipulated, and hence no longer pertinently free, either you may think that Romello does not love Juliet in One Lovely Day, or if he does, his ersatz love is not the sort of love we favor. As I’ll sketch in the following section, sundry factors all beyond our control can affect free or autonomous agency and, hence, affect love.

8.5   More on Love’s Fragility: Love and Moral Sentiments or Attitudes The intimate association between diverse emotions or attitudes and healthy interpersonal relationships, including loving relationships, provides additional support for the thesis that love or at least loving relations have freedom requirements. Justin Oakley writes: There are several ways in which emotions may be construed as constituting relationships of love and friendship. To begin with, the emotions we both feel towards each other in a sense determine the form our relationship takes. That is, our love or friendship for each other is embodied in our caring about promoting each other’s welfare, our feeling sympathetic towards each

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other in regard to our respective problems, and our feeling angry and indignant at injustices suffered by the other, to name only several. Further, emotions may be thought of as constituting relationships of friendship and love in as far as our mutual affection unifies and bestows a certain significance on our joint activities. We see films and go on walks together out of love and friendship, and many such activities, which might otherwise seem separate and isolated, come to be seen as a complex whole in which our love and friendship are manifested. (Oakley 1992: 58)

The general strand of reasoning to be developed (in this section) to expose the freedom commitments of loving relationships is this: Integral to these relationships are various emotions or attitudes. These attitudes presuppose that we are responsible agents, which, in turn, requires that we are relevantly free. It has been plausibly proposed that remorse and guilt are significant to interpersonal relationships partly because if someone were deprived of them, she would be incapable of mending any relationships with people whom she has wronged; and having done wrong, she would lack any motivation to restore her own moral integrity and thus to develop morally. But one’s guilt would be inapt if no one were ever free and, hence, not morally responsible for anything. When one expresses gratitude to another for what she has done, one can do so with the intention of developing a relationship. However, gratitude is appropriate when the agent to whom gratitude is owed is morally responsible for what she did; otherwise, gratitude would be misplaced. Similar things are true of forgiveness. “Well-­ founded” forgiveness presupposes that the person one forgives is blameworthy for her untoward deed. Thus, each of these attitudes presupposes that we are relevantly free because each presupposes the existence of responsibility. What has been overlooked, especially with loving relationships, is that the responsibility that attitudes like remorse, guilt, gratitude, and forgiveness implicate need not be moral. Rather, the praiseworthiness or blameworthiness may be praiseworthiness (“commendability”) or blameworthiness (“censurability”) from love’s standpoint. To modify Bernard Williams’ example, a spouse, saved by his wife who declares that when she rescued him, she acted solely from moral duty and not love, would surely be put off if he discovered the truth (Williams 1976: 214). The wife may be morally praiseworthy but not commendable—not praiseworthy from love’s standpoint—for saving her husband. The fundamental

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suggestion is that, unlike what transpires in this case, typically, in loving relationships the species of “normative responsibility” presupposed by attitudes integral to these relationships is commendability or censurability. Recall, we previously registered that there are duties (or obligations) and prohibitions of love that may well be distinct from the duties or prohibitions of morality. Assuming other requirements of moral responsibility are satisfied, if you intentionally do something that is morally wrong (on some views) or intentionally do something you nonculpably take to be morally wrong (on competing views), you may well be deserving of moral blame. Analogously, if you intentionally do something that love prohibits or you nonculpably take love to prohibit, you may well be deserving of blame from love’s standpoint. In brief, there are non-moral varieties of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. A novice chess player who beats a grandmaster may well be praiseworthy for her worthy moves but the praise here is not moral. Analogously, you may do (or omit to do) something for which you are blameworthy but the blame may be blame from love’s standpoint. For example, you may be forgiven for ignoring a requirement of love that is not a moral requirement when you are censurable—you are non-morally but normatively blameworthy—for intentionally thwarting this requirement. In what would customarily be expected in a Williams-like story, the wife would be commendable—again, non-morally but normatively praiseworthy—for saving her husband. Or imagine that a mother visits her sick child in hospital for no other reason than that she loves him and cares for his well-being. The belief or thought that it is morally right or obligatory for her to visit plays no role whatsoever in the etiology of this action. Any such moral belief fails to enter into her deliberations (if she deliberates at all) about whether to visit; nor does she entertain any moral belief in visiting her child. The mother is not morally deserving of praise for visiting her child. Or suppose the mother gives up one of her kidneys to her child who would not otherwise survive. Assume that she acts from love and not moral duty or any sense of moral concern. Then, again, the loving mother seems not to be morally praiseworthy for giving the kidney. But she is commendable; she is non-morally normatively praiseworthy. She gives up her kidney, roughly, on the basis of the belief that this is what she ought, from love’s perspective, to do. “Ought” in the previous sentence denotes an obligation, or at least some prescriptive element like a duty or a deep commitment, associated with acting from love that is somewhat analogous

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to what one takes to be one’s moral obligation when one acts in light of the belief that one morally ought to do something.8 A few remarks on normative responsibility with attention primarily to normative blameworthiness, are in order.9 As previously illustrated, there are different species of normative blameworthiness. One can be morally, love-wise, or skills-wise blameworthy for intentionally doing various things. Normative blameworthiness is concerned principally with appraising an agent and only derivatively with appraising her behavior. Frequently (but not always) it is associated with normative standards one takes to be significant and calls upon to guide one’s conduct. These standards, broadly construed, may include dictates of custom or tradition, or imperatives deriving from projects or ideals of sizable importance in one’s life. Furthermore, a set of dictates, ideals, or rules qualify as appropriate normative standards that “ground” normative responsibility provided they guide and constrain behavior; they carry, in one’s life, a sort of normative authority. An agent who accepts or endorses a set of normative standards is motivated to act in accordance with them, believes that they provide reasons for action, and is disposed to have (appropriate) pro or con feelings or attitudes in conditions when these standards are implicated. Often, when an agent is normatively blameworthy for something, she contravenes what she takes to be the dictates of the normative standards she endorses. In virtue of such infringement it is frequently fitting when she is normatively blameworthy for her to express apt attitudes (such as guilt or remorse) and for others to adopt appropriate negative attitudes toward her. Finally, there is no presumption that people generally endorse a single set of ideals or standards that guide and constrain behavior across all domains in their lives. With respect to certain concerns, one may act from love, but regarding others, one may act from moral duty.10 If radical reversal cases like One Bad Day show that victimized Sally is not morally blameworthy for killing George, then appropriately constructed analogous cases, such as One Lovely Day, should show that the 8  Lamb proposes that love involves being committed to the beloved where the sense of “commitment” is a sense referring to our obligations as lovers (1997: 28). On Velleman’s Kantian view of love, however, moral obligations and those of love do not come apart in this way. 9  Much of what I say on normative blameworthiness will also apply, with appropriate amendments, to normative praiseworthiness. 10  For more on the concept of normative blameworthiness, see Haji 1998, ch. 11; Haji and Cuypers 2008: 108–111.

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victimized character, M-Romello, is not censurable (or commendable) for his pertinent deeds. Summarizing, the view that “emotions may be construed as constituting relationships of love and friendship” exposes freedom commitments of loving relationships because many of these emotions presuppose that we are morally or non-morally responsible for our germane behavior, and these varieties of responsibility have free agency commitments.

8.6   A Worthy Objection: Love’s Resilience I’ve offered considerations for the view that love or lovable behavior, or the sort of love or lovable behavior worthy of value, is free or autonomous love or autonomous lovable behavior; lack of free agency compromises love. In addition, freedom commitments also underwrite loving relations. On a noteworthy and opposed view that Pereboom defends, which I now briefly address, living without free will doesn’t hinder love. Owing to space restrictions, I confine discussion to Pereboom’s views on the moral emotions or attitudes (hereafter “attitudes”) central to salutary interpersonal relationships. Construe responsibility skepticism as the view that moral responsibility is non-existent in our (the actual) world because sources over which agents in this world lack control ultimately produce their behavior. Not being the ultimate originators of any of our behavior, we aren’t free and, so, aren’t morally responsible for anything. Pereboom is a responsibility skeptic but an optimistic one in that he argues that living without moral responsibility is relatively inconsequential. It’s so because responsibility’s non-existence leaves basically untouched, among several things important to our lives, love and the moral attitudes essential to loving relations (Pereboom 2001, 2014). What fundamentally undergirds Pereboom’s responsibility skepticism is the following principle: Primary Principle: Behavior produced by sources over which their agents lack control, such as actions whose etiologies feature significantly intrusive manipulation, is behavior for which they are not responsible. (Pereboom 2001: 4, 43)

Keeping this grounding principle in mind, it is fairly straightforward to appreciate Pereboom’s skepticism regarding free agency. Take

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determinism to be the doctrine that all events are causally determined in that they are the consequences or products of the laws of nature (whatever they are) and facts of the world in the distant past.11 Indeterminism is the denial of determinism. Either determinism or indeterminism is true at our world. If the former, then we are not responsible for any of our choices or actions because we are not the ultimate originators of them. Our conduct is the product of the distant past and the laws, sources over which we have no control. Pereboom further proposes that there is no relevant and principled difference between an action resulting from responsibility-­ undermining manipulation (as in radical reversal cases like One Bad Day) and an action with a mundane deterministic causal history. Since we are not responsible for the pertinent actions that feature responsibility-­ subverting manipulation, given the “no difference” proposal, it follows that we would not be responsible for any deterministically produced actions. Suppose indeterminism is true at our world. Pereboom argues that in scenarios involving indeterminism, just as in those involving determinism, antecedents over which an agent lacks any control produce her actions. Again, Pereboom’s verdict is that no relevant and principled difference can distinguish an action resulting from responsibility-­undermining manipulation from an action with a more ordinary non-deterministic causal history (Pereboom 2002: 478). He concludes that regardless of whether determinism or indeterminism is true at our world, no one is morally responsible for anything.12 We now have a serious concern regarding interpersonal relations. As we briefly sketched, these relations (including loving relations) are intimately associated with attitudes such as gratitude, forgiveness, or indignation, but these attitudes assume that we are morally responsible agents. Responsibility skepticism, thus, seemingly acutely endangers these relations. Pereboom has a two-pronged response to this concern. He maintains that, all things considered, some attitudes deemed vital to relationships do more harm than good. For instance, he argues that indignation and moral anger are not obviously required for good relationships (Pereboom 2001: 207–213). I set this insightful suggestion aside because it’s not relevant to 11  More rigorously, determinism is the thesis that at any instant exactly one possible future is compatible with the state of the universe at that instant and the laws of nature. 12  Pereboom allows that if we were agent-causes—we as agents, as opposed to events involving agents, are irreducible causes of some events—we could be responsible for some of our conduct. But this isn’t borne out by our best scientific theories (Pereboom 2001: 69–88).

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the ensuing discussion. In addition, Pereboom avers that the primary principle leaves untouched attitudes such as gratitude and forgiveness or core elements of them, which, he concurs, figure centrally in healthy relationships. Regarding the second prong, one of Pereboom’s principal defensive maneuvers distills to this: (1) Various moral attitudes play key roles in initiating or maintaining relationships. For example, good friends or lovers customarily forgive and forgiveness does indeed presuppose that the forgiven is blameworthy for her relevant behavior.13 (2) The primary principle undermines constituents of attitudes critical to relationships that implicate responsibility. (3) However, responsibility’s non-existence leaves unaffected core components of these attitudes or apt replacements for them. (4) The impervious components or replacements can play the germane roles in relationships that the original attitudes do. (5) So, responsibility skepticism does not debunk interpersonal relationships. To illustrate, Pereboom claims that even if responsibility skepticism is true, one may feel profound sorrow and regret on being the instrument of wrongdoing despite believing that one was not in any way blameworthy. He recommends that sorrow and regret can play the pertinent roles that remorse and guilt typically do in relations. For example, sorrow and regret may generate a repentant attitude and thus induce the agent not to perform her immoral action again; they may motivate the agent to make amends by seeking to alleviate the suffering caused to others; and they may help to heal the relation by impelling the agent to express misgiving about her untoward behavior (Pereboom 2001: 205–206). So although gratitude and guilt “would likely be theoretically irrational” for a responsibility skeptic, these attitudes “have analogs that could play the same role they typically have” (Pereboom 2001: 206).14 Pereboom’s second prong to secure interpersonal relationships in a world devoid of responsibility is, however, suspect. The root of the worry is that the primary principle casts its net exhaustively, enmeshing all behavior including the choices or decisions anyone makes and the attitudes anyone expresses. All these things originate in sources beyond anyone’s control; so, no one is the ultimate originator of any of them. The import of this primary principle’s implication for relationships is straightforward. 13  Pereboom is concerned with moral blameworthiness or moral responsibility generally. I’ve proposed that the responsibility may be responsibility from love’s standpoint. 14  See also Pereboom 2014: 179.

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Imagine that Romeo and Juliet are aware that no one is ever morally or non-morally responsible for anything. If Romeo expresses sorrow, an alleged analog of guilt, on a particular occasion in a world without responsibility because he believes he has wronged Juliet, the primary principle implies that not only is Romeo not responsible for his expression of sorrow, but this token of expression is essentially no different than a token of sorrow he would have expressed had he been suitably manipulated. Simply imagine a radical reversal case in which, owing fundamentally to the manipulation, manipulated Romeo expresses sorrow unlike his pre-­ manipulated self. How effective would this token of sorrow be as a vehicle to mending the relationship or as a motivator to restoring Romeo’s moral integrity? Hardly at all, it appears. Aware that Romeo’s token of sorrow might just as well have been the product of nefarious manipulation, why should Juliet regard Romeo’s (unfree) expression of sorrow as “truly his own” and, thus, as conducive to healing the wound? It is free or “authentic” sorrow and not “forced” or ersatz sorrow that is beneficial to mending interpersonal relationships. To amplify, just as we may distinguish between “authentic” springs of action, such as desires that are “truly our own,” and inauthentic springs of action, so we may distinguish between authentic attitudes, authentic sorrow, for instance, and inauthentic attitudes. In One Bad Day, Sally’s engineered-­in Chuck-like values are not “truly her own” or authentic. If she were to express joy on successfully executing George, and this joy were to issue from her implanted values, her token expression of joy would, similarly, not be authentic. Presumably, the responsibility skeptic like Pereboom accepts the condition that a desire or an attitude is authentic only if it does not ultimately derive from sources over which the agent lacks any control. The original concern responsibility skepticism generates for some attitudes pivotal to healthy interpersonal relationships is that they are inappropriate in a no-responsibility world owing to presupposing responsibility, something non-existent in such worlds. The responsibility skeptic proposes that the role these threatened attitudes play in relationships can be assumed by other attitudes that are on sure footing in such worlds. However, if there is a legitimate distinction between, for example, free or authentic and unfree or inauthentic sorrow, and all sorrow in a no-responsibility world is, as the responsibility skeptic is committed to conceding, unfree or inauthentic, then the original concern of responsibility skepticism regarding attitudes such as guilt resurfaces with the proposed replacements.

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One may rejoin that the point of sorrow’s replacing guilt in Pereboom’s discussion is that sorrow is unlike guilt, presumably, because it’s a feeling that is not subject to the inauthentic/authentic divide. One could argue that genuine sorrow just happens to us—like a more sophisticated version of pain—and even if sorrow is implanted in us by malevolent manipulators, we’re still genuinely sad.15 However, this objection overlooks a crucial and contentious factor in Pereboom’s strategy to secure sorrow as a replacement for guilt: even engineered-in sorrow can play the same role as guilt does—for instance, healing a relationship—in our day-to-day interactions. Imagine that your world is deterministic; Seth unjustifiably harms you and then expresses sorrow. The event, Seth’s expressing sorrow, is deterministically produced and, hence, in Pereboom’s view not relevantly different from such an event that Seth would have brought about but only because of the kind of manipulation manifest in One Bad Day. Knowing this, how effective would such an expression of sorrow be in mending the relationship? If you feel guilt only because you’ve been manipulated to feel it and the other party knows this, such guilt is not going to help set matters right. Why should things be any different if you’re manipulated to feel sorrow instead of guilt?16

8.7   Final Thoughts You may wonder why we should care about Romello’s plight when it has nothing to do with our own. He’s a puppet on the manipulators’ strings, we’re not! Exposing the freedom presuppositions of love should give us reason for pause. Pereboom’s argument for free will skepticism may convince you that we are not free agents. Or other arguments for free will skepticism may sway you.17 Or, even if you think that determinism and indeterminism can both accommodate free will, you may be persuaded that various factors that are out of our control—such as our genetic constitution and the environment in which we were brought up—leave us substantially unfree. Indeed, I believe that a large swath of our conduct that we normally think is within our control really isn’t. For instance, what choices we are able to make is dependent upon what motivations we have,  I thank Simon Cushing for this objection.  There is another concern with the objection that I here simply flag. Sorrow is relevantly unlike pain in that you can unjustifiably express sorrow. 17  See, for example, Smilansky 2000; Strawson 1986. 15 16

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but what motivations we have is very often beyond our control and so subject to freedom-undermining luck (see Haji 2016). If we’re substantially unfree, then love will be compromised because love is, oh so fragile!18

References Cocking, Dean, and Jeanette Kennett. 1998. Friendship and the Self. Ethics 108: 502–527. Double, Richard. 1991. The Non-Reality of Free Will. New  York: Oxford University Press. Frankfurt, Harry G. 1999. On Caring. In Necessity, Volition, and Love, 155–180. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2002. Reply to John Martin Fischer. In Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt, ed. S. Buss and L. Overton, 27–31. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Green, O.H. 1997. Is Love an Emotion? In Love Analyzed, ed. Roger E. Lamb, 209–224. Boulder: Westview. Haji, Ishtiyaque. 1998. Moral Appraisability: Puzzles, Proposals, and Perplexities. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2009. Incompatibilism’s Allure: Principal Arguments for Incompatibilism. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. ———. 2013. Historicism, Non-Historicism, or a Mix? Journal of Ethics 17: 185–204. ———. 2016. Luck’s Mischief. New York: Oxford University Press. Haji, Ishtiyaque, and Stefaan Cuypers. 2008. Moral Responsibility, Authenticity, and Education. New York: Routledge. Kolodny, Niko. 2003. Love as Valuing a Relationship. Philosophical Review 112: 135–189. Lamb, Roger E. 1997. Love and Rationality. In Love Analyzed, ed. R.E. Lamb, 23–47. Boulder: Westview Press. Mele, Alfred. 2006. Free Will and Luck. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2016. Moral Responsibility: Radical Reversals and Original Design. Journal of Ethics 20: 69–82. ———. 2019. Manipulated Agents: A Window to Moral Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press. Oakley, Justin. 1992. Morality and the Emotions. New York: Routledge. Pereboom, Derk. 2001. Living Without Free Will. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 18  This paper was completed during my tenure of a 2017–2021 Social Sciences and Humanities Research (SSHRC) grant. I thank this granting agency for its support. I’m most grateful to Simon Cushing for his comments and suggestions.

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———. 2002. Living Without Free Will: The Case for Hard Incompatibilism. In The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, ed. Robert Kane, 477–488. New  York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2014. Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life. New  York: Oxford University Press. Pettit, Philip. 1997. Love and Its Place in Moral Discourse. In Love Analyzed, ed. R.E. Lamb, 153–163. Boulder: Westview Press. Smilansky, Saul. 2000. Free Will and Illusion. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Strawson, Galen. 1986. Freedom and Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thomas, Lawrence. 1987. Friendship. Synthese 72: 217–236. Velleman, David. 1999. Love as a Moral Emotion. Ethics 109: 338–374. Watson, Gary. 1999. Soft Libertarianism and Hard Compatibilism. Journal of Ethics 3: 353–368. Williams, Bernard. 1976. Persons, Character, and Morality. In The Identities of Persons, ed. A.  Oksenberg Rorty, 197–215. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 9

Sentimental Reasons Edgar Phillips

9.1   Introduction Among the things we do, some we do for reasons and some we don’t. When we act intentionally, for instance, we normally have some reason for doing what we are doing. We believe for reasons and choose for reasons. We do not, at least not in the same sense, sweat, feel tired, or digest our food for reasons. Other examples are somewhat less easy to categorize. For example, it might not seem as immediately clear whether we feel emotions for reasons; there is, after all, a long tradition of thinking of the emotions as interfering with our ability to act and think rationally or in line with reason. While emotions certainly can interfere with our ability to remain rational, though (we all know what it’s like for our emotions to get the better of us), this doesn’t necessarily mean we have no reasons for our emotions. And on reflection, it is quite natural to think that we do: when you feel angry or relieved, for instance, there will be, except perhaps in marginal cases, something that made you angry, or something that you feel angry or relieved about or by. It is quite natural here to use the

E. Phillips (*) Institut Jean Nicod at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Cushing (ed.), New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72324-8_9

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language of reasons: your reason for feeling angry is that your friend betrayed you; the reason for your relief is that the operation is finally over.1 Things seem even less clear if we turn to consider whether we love for reasons.2 While a number of philosophers have claimed that we do not love for reasons, many insist that we do. Interestingly, even among those who hold that we love for reasons, there is remarkable disagreement as to what sorts of things those reasons are, so much so that it seems sensible to consider carefully just what it is that the disagreement is about: what should an account of ‘reasons for love’ seek to account for? The aim of this chapter is to try to reach a degree of clarity about this question and in doing so to shed some light on debates about reasons for love. To this end, I will first, in the next section, give a brief overview of some leading views about reasons for love, showing how different kinds of considerations seem to pull us toward very different views. I will then introduce a distinction commonly made in discussions of reasons for action, between three different roles that reasons can play, or between three different interests that commonly figure in our talk about ‘reasons’. As I’ll explain, it is attractive to see these interests or roles as coinciding in a certain way when someone does, thinks, or feels something ‘for a reason’. One way to understand the nature of the debate about reasons for love, I will suggest, is that many of those involved in this debate assume that the same kind of coincidence of interests must be present in the case of love if indeed we love ‘for reasons’. In the end, I’ll suggest that we might make better sense of love if we were to drop this assumption.

9.2   Reasons for Love Do we love for reasons? It can be tempting to say that we don’t. In a romantic mood, the suggestion that love is based on reasons can look absurdly or even creepily high-minded, cold-hearted, and calculating. Love, after all, is the paradigmatic passion. Compared with the actions we 1  There is, of course, much more to be said about the relationship between emotions, reasons, and rationality. For a seminal discussion, see de Sousa (1987). See also Deonna and Teroni (2012). 2  If love is an emotion, the point here is that things are less clear in the case of love than they are in the case of certain other emotions. But perhaps love is not itself an emotion, even though it is intimately connected with emotions. Either way, I will argue later that there are significant differences between love and emotions like anger and relief, such that love deserves separate treatment.

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take and attitudes we hold for reasons, love comes from somewhere deeper in our soul. We don’t decide to love: we fall in love; love overcomes us, sweeps us off our feet, carries us away; love is, in Nick Zangwill’s phrase, ‘gloriously arational’ (Zangwill 2013). On the other hand, though, love seems closer to those emotions that we do (plausibly) feel for reasons than it is to clearer examples of things we do but not for any reason, such as sweating, digesting, or feeling tired. Love, from the lover’s perspective, feels like a ‘fitting’ response to the beloved, in something like the way that anger feels like a fitting response to being wronged, or fear a fitting response to imminent danger. Moreover, loving someone seems to involve our valuing or caring about them, and the things we value or care about are not, from our point of view, arbitrary or selected merely by chance: they seem to us worth valuing, worth caring about. What could make something worth valuing except a reason to value it? So there is some pressure to say that we love for reasons. Trying to say anything much about what sorts of things those reasons are, though, proves to be rather more difficult—more difficult, notably, than in the case of our other examples of ‘reasons-responsive’ phenomena. Reasons for believing seem clearly enough to be concerned with the truth of the things we might be inclined to believe. The fact that the streets are wet, for instance, might be a reason to believe that it has rained, because it suggests that it has in fact rained. Reasons for feeling emotions generally concern whether the ‘object’ of the emotion (the thing, event, or person toward which the emotion is felt) exemplifies what is called the formal object of the emotion: danger or fearsomeness for fear, wrongfulness or insult for anger, and so on (see Deonna and Teroni 2012 for a detailed exposition of this idea). So, for instance, my reason for feeling angry at you might be that you betrayed my trust, this being a case of you wronging me. Reasons for action appear to be more diverse and there is a greater degree of disagreement over what unites them, but we can at least say that they broadly relate to the point of taking one or another course of action.3 Your reason for taking your umbrella when you go out, for instance, might be that it 3  One way to explicate this idea, for example, is to say that reasons for action relate to the good at which the action aims: the good in question gives the action its point (e.g. Raz 1999). A different approach appeals to the desires of the agent: the point of acting is to satisfy one’s desires (e.g. Schroeder 2007). Perhaps the right account combines both ideas somehow (e.g. Chang 2011), or appeals to something else such as norms or rules or rationality (e.g. Korsgaard 1996). Since our present concern is with love, not action, there is thankfully no need for us to take a stand on this difficult issue here.

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seems likely that the rain will return and that the umbrella will help keep you dry; your reason for apologizing to me might be that you did me wrong and apologizing will be the first step to mending our damaged relationship. If we suppose that there are indeed reasons for love, though, what sorts of things might they be? An initially appealing strategy would be to analogize love to emotions like fear or regret and to say that reasons for love concern whether the actual or potential ‘object’ of love—the actual or potential beloved— instances the ‘formal object’ of love. As the formal object of fear is the fearsome, and that of regret is the regrettable, so the formal object of love, we might suggest, is the lovable (compare Naar 2017b). So, reasons for love might be facts about a person that suggest that that person is lovable, or perhaps properties of the person in virtue of which they are lovable. However, while this suggestion makes for a nice linguistic consistency with emotions like fear and regret, it doesn’t fit very well with how we ordinarily think about love, at least if we are using ‘lovable’ in its everyday sense. To be lovable in that sense is, roughly, to be easy to love. In particular, certain qualities, perhaps including things like charm, a gentle wit, kindness, and innocence might tend to make one who possesses them lovable. Surely, though, lacking such qualities doesn’t mean that nobody has any reason to love you. Most people, I suspect, will have someone—a friend, a family member, perhaps even a romantic partner—whom they love and care about despite that person’s not being particularly lovable. Moreover, a complete stranger might be exceedingly lovable without this giving me any particular reason to love them. The appeal to ‘lovableness’, then, seems not to give a very satisfactory account of what reasons for love consist in. We might, however, think that this first attempt does get something importantly right, namely, that reasons for love consist in personal qualities or properties of the beloved. Sometimes the qualities of a person that give us reason to love them will be ones that make them lovable, but they might also often include qualities that would not so naturally fall under this heading, such as, perhaps, cleverness, resilience, or bravery. Even among authors who agree on the basic idea that reasons for love are personal qualities, though, there is disagreement as to what the relevant qualities have in common. Neil Delaney, for instance, argues that we want to be loved for properties that we take to be central to our conception of ourselves (Delaney 1996; also compare Keller 2000), while Kate Abramson and Adam Leite hold that reasons for love consist in ‘morally laudable’ qualities of the beloved’s character

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(Abramson and Leite 2011). While these might sometimes coincide, they can obviously come apart. Most of us do not conceive of ourselves exclusively in terms of our morally laudable qualities. The idea that personal qualities are reasons for love looks appealing because it seems both to capture the idea of love as a response to another person as such (as opposed to, say, anger, which, while typically directed at a person, is usually a response to something that they have done rather than to who they are or what they are like) and, since different people have different qualities, to offer the beginnings of an account of why we love some people and not others. Yet some of the most compelling criticisms of the so-called quality view are in fact based on the apparent shallowness of the account that it offers of the latter phenomenon, the ‘selectivity’ of love. Love, as we ordinarily think of it, involves a deep attachment to particular individuals. A series of objections to the quality view have been taken to show that it cannot make sense of this aspect of love: • Universality: If my reasons for loving you are qualities you have, should anyone else who is aware of those qualities love you too and in the same way? • Promiscuity: Should I love, in the same way, anyone else who has the same qualities? • Trading up: If someone else has the same qualities to a greater degree, should I love them instead, or more? • Inconstancy: If you lose the relevant qualities, should I stop loving you? (adapted from Setiya 2014: 255). It seems very plausible that the answer to each question should be negative. This imposes an explanatory challenge upon a proponent of the quality view. One way in which they might attempt to meet this challenge is to say that the reasons for loving someone are not ‘requiring’ or ‘maximizing’ (Abramson and Leite 2011; Jollimore 2011; Setiya 2014). To say that reasons for love are not requiring would mean that they can make a person fitting or ‘eligible’ to love without obliging anyone to love them. To say that they are not maximizing would mean that from the fact that there is more reason to love person B than person A, it does not follow that you ought to love person B rather than person A. If the reasons for love are non-requiring and non-maximizing, this allows us to respond to the aforementioned objections in the following ways. First, if my love for you is justified, it may follow that anyone else who is aware of the qualities

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that justify my love has sufficient reason to love you and could in principle love you justifiably. However, it does not follow that they must love you: the qualities in question make it appropriate for them to love you, without making it inappropriate for them not to love you. Second, if the qualities that justify my love for you do not require me to love you, then I am also not required to love anyone else with the same qualities. Third, since the reasons for love are not maximizing, I am not required to love anyone who possesses the same qualities to a greater degree or extent. This addresses the objections from Universality, Promiscuity, and Trading Up. What about Inconstancy? One possible deflation of the challenge is this (compare Jollimore 2011): everyone, or just about everyone, has some good qualities. If love is not maximizing, perhaps it does not take very much for love to be justified, and it is enough that the actual or potential beloved has some good qualities. Moreover, it is part of loving someone, at least normally, to see the good in them, so that once you already love someone you will not easily take them to have no good qualities. If so, then the kind of change of character necessary for one to lose one’s justification for loving someone might have to be really quite extreme: they might have to become a kind of monster. In that case, perhaps one really ought to stop loving them. Even if the challenges from Universality, Promiscuity, Trading Up, and Inconstancy can be addressed in these ways, though, there is a further and more difficult challenge to the quality view. This is presented by Niko Kolodny as the problem of Nonsubstitutability: If Jane’s qualities are my reasons for loving her, then they are equally reasons for my loving anyone else with the same qualities. Insofar as my love for Jane is responsive to its reasons, therefore, it ought to accept anyone with the same qualities as a substitute. But an attitude that would accept just as well any Doppelgänger … that happened along would scarcely count as love. (Kolodny 2003: 140–141)

Making the reasons for love non-requiring and non-maximizing does not help here. The point about nonsubstitutability that poses the problem for the quality view is not just that I am not required to love the Doppelgänger; it’s that a willingness to accept the Doppelgänger as a substitute or replacement for Jane would show that I did not really love her at all. The point of the nonsubstitutability objection is that love (as Kraut 1987 emphasizes) picks out the beloved as a particular individual. Personal

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qualities, being the kind of thing that can in principle be shared by multiple people, seem insufficiently ‘particular’ to explain this aspect of love. Different authors have sought to resolve this difficulty in different ways, but a common strategy is to appeal to historical or relational factors to explain why one person’s love for another picks out that other as a particular individual. An influential version of this approach is developed by Kolodny (2003), who argues that your reason for loving someone consists in the fact that you have a valuable relationship with them. Because your relationship with another person is a relationship with them and no one else, this explains the nonsubstitutability of the beloved in an attractively straightforward manner. Moreover, there seems to be something right in the idea that your love for another person has something important to do with your personal history with them, particularly when that history is relatively long and the love is deep and abiding. If you ask yourself why you love your partner, you might, in line with the quality view, think about all the wonderful things about them. Equally, though, you might, as the ‘relationship view’ would suggest, think about all the times you have had together, the things you have done for and with one another, your struggles and triumphs and adventures, and so on. The relationship view neatly explains why such past events should seem significant. With that being said, the relationship view still strikes many as implausible in important respects (for criticisms of Kolodny’s account, see, e.g., Smuts 2014; Setiya 2014; Na’aman 2015; Protasi 2016). A central concern is that the view loses the idea that love is in the first instance a response to another individual, not to one’s relationship with that individual. Other authors have sought to preserve this idea while taking advantage of the relational aspect of Kolodny’s account, suggesting that the presence of a relationship with the other person is a kind of background condition, so that other considerations—in particular, considerations about the other person’s qualities or character—are the lover’s reasons for loving them, but that they only count as such in a suitable ‘relational context’ (Abramson and Leite 2011; Naar 2017b, forthcoming). When you think about your history with your partner, on this view, what matter are the qualities of character that they expressed in those past interactions with you: the ways in which they showed you their kindness, generosity, courage, and the like. Again, though, there are problems. How does this kind of view explain parents’ love for their children, for instance? It’s doubtful whether infants in particular have any morally laudable qualities of character, and certainly they will not have had much opportunity to express any such character in

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interactions with their parents, yet it goes without saying that parents normally feel profound love for their infant children. Indeed, familial love can pose problems even when the beloved is an adult. People who are seriously lacking in good qualities of character are often still loved by their parents or siblings. Perhaps there is something pathological or irrational about a parent’s love for their amoral or vicious offspring—but perhaps not. We often speak of ‘unconditional love’ as something admirable, not something to be condemned. We might be encouraged, by all these difficulties, to try a radically different approach. Some authors, for instance, have argued that the reasons for love are minimal and universal: that someone’s mere humanity (Setiya 2014), or perhaps their personhood (Velleman 1999), is sufficient reason for loving them. This has the appealing implication that it is never a mistake, never inappropriate or unfitting, to love another human being. There is nothing wrong with loving a vicious family member—or indeed anyone else for that matter. But while this sounds like a nice idea, it lacks any obvious way of accounting for the selectivity of love. It seems from my point of view that I have special reasons for loving my partner of many years, reasons I would not have for loving anyone else and especially not some random stranger. Yet my partner and the stranger are just as much human beings, just as much persons.4

9.3   Disentangling ‘Reasons’: Explanation, Understanding, Justification In seeking a unified account of reasons for love, we seem to be pulled in different directions. Moreover, we seem to be pulled in these different directions by different kinds of considerations. The ideas of love as a response to another person, as involving a kind of appreciation of that person, and the idea that we want to be loved for who we are suggest a view of reasons for love as personal qualities of the beloved. What I’ve called the selectivity and particularity of love, its character as an attachment to a particular individual as such, emphasize the significance of historical and relational factors. Both personal qualities and historical–relational factors seem to be relevant in explaining why we love the specific people we 4  Velleman (1999: 370ff.) makes an attempt at squaring this circle. Setiya (2014) avoids it by allowing that while someone’s humanity is sufficient reason to love them, having a relationship with them can provide a further, more forceful reason to love them.

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love. And a view that emphasizes either one of these factors in characterizing reasons for love seems to risk conflict with an appealing ethical ideal according to which no one is unworthy of love and that it is never inappropriate to love someone. The multifariousness of considerations at play here makes it difficult to arbitrate between different theories. If we are pulled in different directions by different kinds of considerations, which should we prioritize? This, in turn, points us toward a more basic question: What exactly is it that these theories are disagreeing about? That is, what is a theory of ‘reasons for love’ supposed to explain? One way we might try to gain some clarity here is to think about the more general notions of ‘a reason’ and of doing things ‘for reasons’. As we noted earlier, there are phenomena other than love to which these notions are more obviously applicable—notably, belief and intentional action. Questions about reasons for belief and action and what it is to believe or act for a reason have also received rather more philosophical attention than the corresponding questions about love. By looking at some distinctions and ideas developed in discussions of reasons for action and belief, then, we might hope to bring some more clarity to our questions about reasons for love. It is commonplace in the philosophy of action to make a distinction between kinds of reasons, in particular between justifying (or ‘normative’), explanatory, and motivating reasons. Another way to put it, which allows for the possibility that one reason might justify, explain, and motivate, is that these are different roles that reasons can play (Alvarez 2010). Even less committally, we might just distinguish different interests that can be operative in our talk about reasons: sometimes we are concerned with what we ought to do or with a person’s justification for what they did; sometimes we are interested in why someone did what they did; sometimes we are interested in what motivated the person to do what they did, or on what grounds or basis they did it (compare Fogal 2018). To illustrate the distinction, let’s take a concrete example. I knock your favorite cup off the table. The cup smashes on the floor, leaving tea and shards of china all over the parquet. You might well want to know why I did this. Anything that accurately answers that question (hence that explains my action), we can call an explanatory reason. Suppose I knocked the cup off the table because I saw a face at the window and it made me jump. In this case, the fact that I saw a face at the window is an explanatory reason for my action—it’s a reason why I knocked the cup off the table. It needn’t be the only such reason: we could equally cite the fact that the face

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startled me, that I am a jumpy person, that the cup was too close to the edge of the table, and so on. In general, a whole host of factors will be relevant for the purposes of explaining any given action. Which constitute the best or most relevant explanation will depend on various factors— most obviously, on what is already known or assumed in the context of explanation. Now, consider another version of the example where a different explanation is available. Suppose I knock the cup off the table in order to get back at you for some perceived slight. Here we can explain my action in a special way: by giving my reasons for knocking the cup off the table. Maybe I did it because I wanted to get my own back at you, or because you offended me, or because I thought you deserved to have your favorite cup ruined. These are still ‘explanatory reasons’ in a perfectly good sense, but they are also my reasons in a sense that the explanatory reasons considered above were not. When we say that I knocked the cup off the table because you offended me, or because I wanted to upset you, we explain my action, but we explain it specifically by showing what point there was, from my point of view, in taking that course of action, thus revealing my purpose or intention in doing what I did. These kinds of explanations make sense of my action by showing what motivated me so to act. Hence, the kinds of factors cited in such explanations are commonly called motivating reasons. Something like the distinction between explanation in general and a narrower kind of explanation in terms of the person’s own reasons seems to have application beyond the case of action, including to phenomena— in particular to certain sorts of psychological states or attitudes—with regard to which the language of ‘motivation’ seems less apt. So, for instance, if you ask me why my friend believes that 5G makes people sick, ‘Because they read it online’ seems to give something like the kind of explanation we are interested in, while ‘Because they’re a paranoid conspiracy theorist’ doesn’t. The former tells us something about the basis on which my friend believes this claim and so tells us something about their reasons for believing it, even though it doesn’t identify a ‘motivation’ for believing it.5 Similarly, the density and speed of traffic might explain my 5  Beliefs can sometimes be motivated. People do sometimes engage in motivated reasoning or wishful thinking, believing things that they want to believe because they want to believe them. We tend to think of such beliefs as irrational, and it seems that believing in this way involves some degree of self-deception, with the believer convincing themselves that they actually have good grounds for believing as they do. While this phenomenon may be more

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fear of crossing the road by giving my reason for feeling afraid. Again, though, the traffic does not motivate me to feel frightened; it simply frightens me. It’s plausible, then, that we might make a similar distinction regarding love, even though love isn’t something we normally think of as involving motivation in the way that action does. In light of this, I’ll henceforth use the term personal reasons rather than the more action-­ specific ‘motivating reasons’. This also raises a question, though. If it isn’t just their connection with motivation that makes personal reasons distinctive, what is it? A reasonable first pass, I think, is that personal reasons explanations provide a distinctively interpersonal form of understanding. What explanations in terms of a person’s own reasons distinctively do is to enable us to understand things like actions, thoughts, and emotions from the point of view of their agent or subject. In particular, they enable us to see the actions, thoughts, and feelings that they explain not merely as things that were, say, likely to happen given the conditions mentioned in the explanation, but rather as things that at least to some extent made sense to the person whose actions, thoughts, or feelings they were. For now, we can think of personal reasons as serving a specific interest, an interest in interpersonal, ‘empathetic’ understanding. We will look at one way of explaining what’s distinctive about this kind of understanding, and hence about personal reasons, in the next section. First, though, we need to consider the final term of our tripartite distinction: justifying reasons. Consider again my action of breaking the cup. We’ve so far considered a broader and a narrower sense of the question, ‘Why did you do that?’ Another kind of question you might reasonably ask concerns what philosophers call the normative status of my action: whether it was appropriate, sensible, worthwhile, right, justified, and so on, or, put in the language of reasons, whether there was good reason for me to do what I did. Our interest in asking such questions is not primarily a concern with why the action was taken, but with whether the action should have been taken, or whether there was anything to be said in favor of taking it. There will often be a certain overlap between justifying reasons and personal reasons. If I believe something on the basis of a sound inference, then the premises of that inference should both explain and justify my belief. Nonetheless, the interests of justification and interpersonal common than we would like to admit, it probably shouldn’t be our paradigm of believing for a reason.

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understanding are in principle distinct, as can be illustrated by the case of the cup. The explanation of my breaking the cup in terms of your having slighted me makes my action perfectly intelligible: you can understand what point I saw in doing what I did. Yet, accepting the explanation as an explanation, you might still object that I shouldn’t have done what I did. A perceived insult, you might say, is no good reason to destroy someone else’s property. My action was not justified. If, on the other hand, I knocked the cup off the table in order to distract the assassin who was sneaking up behind you, this might justify my action—to make my taking that course of action right or appropriate. Again, the same distinction also applies to attitudes such as belief and emotion. The emotions are of particular relevance for our purposes in this chapter: love, while perhaps not an emotion in itself, is clearly a passion in a way that beliefs and actions are not. Take again my fear of crossing the road. It’s plausible that fear is in general appropriate or fitting when the object of fear is threatening, dangerous, or fearsome (Deonna and Teroni 2012). So there is a kind of normative standard that applies to fear. We can think of justifying reasons for fear as considerations that bear on whether this standard is met in a given case. In our example, it is indeed dangerous to cross the road because of the density and speed of the traffic: the density and speed of the traffic are reasons for me to feel afraid. By contrast, if I’m afraid of a perfectly harmless spider, there is no such justifying reason: my fear might be perfectly intelligible, but it isn’t fitting or appropriate. Having distinguished these different interests at play in reasons-talk— explanation, first-personal intelligibility, justification—can we start to make better sense of the difficulty we faced in accounting for reasons for love? One obvious suggestion is that different accounts of reasons for love—as personal qualities, as historical relationships, as mere humanity— emphasize one or other of the different interests of reasons-talk. To take a specific example, the central challenge to the simple quality view—the main proponents of which present it primarily in terms of one person’s reasons for loving another, or the reasons for which one person loves another (Delaney 1996; Keller 2000), suggesting that it is intended in the first instance as an account of personal reasons—was that it fails to explain why love does not accept substitutes, because if qualities are your reason for loving one person, then they should equally count as reasons for loving another person. Note that this move only makes sense if we are talking about reasons to love, that is to say justifying reasons. If the properties of a particular loaf of bread at the bakery make it suitable to buy,

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then another qualitatively identical loaf of bread will be just as suitable to buy. So, all else being equal, rationally speaking, I ought to be indifferent between the two loaves. If I in fact buy the first loaf, though, then its qualities may be among my personal reasons for buying it, but I have no personal reasons for buying the second loaf (at least not in the sense of ‘personal reasons’ sketched earlier), simply because I didn’t buy it: there is no action of buying the second loaf to be explained. If all that we wanted the qualities of the beloved to do, then, in their capacity as ‘reasons for love’, was to provide a special kind of understanding of love—understanding love from the lover’s point of view—it’s not at all clear that the nonsubstitutability problem would be any problem at all. Perhaps, then, the resolution to our puzzle about reasons for love is simply to treat the distinct interests of justification, explanation, and understanding separately. This would, however, involve a significant departure from the way that many have proposed to understand reasons. While we can in principle distinguish justifying, explanatory, and motivating reasons for action, belief, and emotion, it is nonetheless attractive to think that there is also a certain unity or interdependence between them. One way to capture this unity is in the idea that action, belief, and emotion are responsive to reasons.

9.4   A Confluence of Interests: ‘Responding’ to Reasons Personal and justifying reasons, as we have already observed, can overlap. Perhaps this is more than a mere coincidence. In cases where a reason that justifies an action, belief, or emotion also makes it interpersonally intelligible, it often seems that the reason serves the latter role partly in virtue of serving the former: sometimes an action (for instance) ‘makes sense’ to a person precisely because it is something that that person has good reason to do. Specifically, this dovetailing of interests seems to occur when someone does something for a good reason, or because there is good reason to do it. You believe that it has rained because the streets are wet: you believe that it has rained because you recognize the wet streets as good evidence that it has rained. The wetness of the streets not only both justifies your belief and explains it from your point of view, but, it seems plausible to say, it does the latter in virtue of doing the former. This kind of connection between justifying and personal reasons suggests another way of thinking

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of what’s distinctive about the latter. Actions, beliefs, and emotions are all subject to justifying reasons: each action, belief, or emotion has considerations that count for or against it. It’s natural to think that ideally, our doing, thinking, and feeling should be appropriately sensitive to such considerations. We should, ideally, do these things on the basis of good reasons. Our actions and attitudes, that is, should be responsive to their justifying reasons. To respond to a justifying reason in this way, you first need to be aware of it. If, as many philosophers have argued, justifying reasons are facts (see, e.g., Alvarez 2010; Kolodny 2005; Lord 2018; Parfit 2011; Raz 1986, 1999; Scanlon 1998), then being aware of a justifying reason plausibly means, at the very least, believing that the fact obtains.6 Crucially, we can respond to our beliefs as reasons even when what we believe is not true. Where what we believe is not true, though, it cannot (at least on the view we are here supposing) be a justifying reason. Yet when we act or think or feel on false beliefs in this way, our actions and attitudes are still potentially susceptible to the kind of interpersonal understanding that I have suggested is provided by personal reasons. Moreover, even when our beliefs are true, the facts on which we act are sometimes our personal reasons without being genuine justifying reasons—as, for example, when I break your precious cup in retaliation to a mild insult. Personal reasons, then, cannot simply be defined as those justifying reasons in response to which a person does what they do. However, there is still some hope for understanding what makes personal reasons special by appeal to the notion of justifying reasons. In particular, we might seek to understand personal reasons as things that seem to the person like (justifying) reasons for acting, thinking, or feeling as they do in response (Alvarez 2010; Scanlon 1998). It may well be that a minor slight is no reason to damage someone’s property. It might even be that you didn’t actually slight me at all and I simply misinterpreted your remark. There was no justifying reason, then, for me to break your cup. Perhaps, though, I did what I did because it seemed to me as if there was such a reason: I believed that you slighted me, and this seemed to me, in my anger, like a reason to destroy something you value. The special way in which my personal reasons explain my breaking the cup, on this way of thinking, is that they 6  A number of philosophers have argued that it means actually knowing the fact in question (e.g. Hornsby 2008; Hyman 1999; McDowell 2013; Williamson 2000). Whether this is right isn’t important for our purposes here, so I will simply focus on belief.

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reveal how there seemed to me, at the time, to be some justification for acting in that way. This, just maybe, gives us a way of explaining what is distinctive about personal reasons: they explain a person’s actions or attitudes by showing us how, from that person’s point of view, there was something to be said for acting, thinking, or feeling as they did (compare Davidson 1980: 9). Note how this picture unifies our understanding of justifying and personal reasons. Our personal reasons are, loosely speaking, just what seem to us to be justifying reasons. As long as we have a reasonable understanding of what sorts of facts in general count in favor of what kinds of responses, then it will make sense, given this ‘reasons-responsiveness’ picture, to address questions about justifying and personal reasons together. Determining what sorts of things justify responses will tell us a lot about the reasons for which people respond, and looking at people’s personal reasons might help us think about what kinds of considerations justify. Of course, people can make mistakes, often very serious ones, about what’s justifiable, so we will have to be careful. The point is just that, on this ‘reasons-responsiveness’ picture, the two kinds of reasons are not wholly separate. Through the lens of ‘reasons-responsiveness’, we can begin to see why separating out the different interests of reasons-talk, as I suggested in the last section, could seem misguided. If love is reasons-responsive in the present sense, the questions of what justifies love and of what explains it from the lover’s point of view are not so separate. In saying what justifies love, we would say a lot about what makes sense of it for the lover; understanding how love makes sense to the lover could tell us a lot about what seems to us to justify love. The difficulties we came across in our overview of the different theories of reasons for love would not, in this case, be easily resolved by distinguishing justification and interpersonal understanding, because these two interests, while distinct, are nonetheless intimately interconnected. Indeed, the assumption that love is reasons-responsive in something like the present sense seems implicit in many of the authors we have discussed. Niko Kolodny comes close to making it explicit, basing some of his arguments on the premise that what normally sustains emotional concern (which he takes to be partly constitutive of love) is a good guide to the normative (that is, justifying) reasons for it (Kolodny 2003: 162). Even where there is no such explicit methodological claim, it is not uncommon to frame discussion in terms of love’s ‘reasons-responsiveness’

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(see especially Abramson and Leite 2011, 2018),7 and more generally to move somewhat freely between claims about the psychology and intelligibility of love on the one hand and claims about its appropriateness or justification on the other. Recall the objections to the quality view of reasons for love: the problems of Universality, Promiscuity, Trading Up, Inconstancy, and Nonsubstitutability. Each appeals to what seems like an intuitive judgment about the psychological character of love. We don’t just think that it’s wrong, irrational, or inappropriate for love to be transferred, to treat one’s beloved as fungible, or to be ready to ‘trade up’; rather, we think (and this is reflected in the way that the challenges are typically expressed) that an attitude that behaved in this way would not be love. This is a claim about the nature of love, about what it is to love someone. Yet the objections presuppose that this must be explained in terms of the kinds of justifying reasons to which love is subject. Similarly, one major problem with the idea that someone’s mere humanity or personhood is sufficient reason to love them was that it doesn’t provide an explanation (first- or third-­ personal) of why we love the particular people we love—it doesn’t give us a satisfactory account of personal reasons for love. There seems, then, to be an underlying assumption to the effect that the way love behaves psychologically must be explained in relation to the justifying reasons to which it is sensitive. An obvious explanation for that assumption is the further assumption that in so far as we love for reasons, love must be reasons-­responsive in something like the sense I have sketched in this section.

9.5   Love as a Sentiment But is it plausible that love is reasons-responsive in this sense? Is it plausible to think of love as sensitive to facts in the same sort of way that actions and beliefs are? There are, after all, very significant differences between love and these other ‘reasons-responsive’ phenomena. Consider some of the characteristic ways in which intentions and beliefs are formed and 7  Abramson and Leite (2018) express skepticism about the analysis of reasons-­responsiveness as necessarily running via the agent’s judgments or beliefs. Nonetheless, they maintain that love is reasons-responsive and seem clearly to think that an account of love’s justifying reasons needs to make sense of its psychology in something like the way outlined in the previous paragraph.

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revised. Through reasoning, deliberation, judgment, and choice, we have the capacity to consider what reasons there are for and against believing or doing this or that and then determining what to think or do in light of these considerations. When relevant new information arises, we can change our minds, stop doing what we are doing, revise our plans, or change our beliefs. In part because of this, intentions and beliefs are ‘fragile’ (as Wollheim 2003 puts it), readily changing in response to changes in our situation. Part of the reason it makes sense to expect reasons for acting and believing to play a privileged role in explaining what we think and do is that we possess such rational ‘control’ over them: generally (and idealizing somewhat) we wouldn’t be doing what we are doing, or thinking what we are thinking, if there didn’t seem to us to be good reason for so doing or thinking. Love, at the very least, looks considerably less ‘fragile’—more substantial, we might say—than intentions and beliefs. Love seems to belong to a category of psychological states sometimes called ‘sentiments’: deep, long-­ lasting, affective orientations toward specific things, which manifest in a diverse range of ways in our emotions, thoughts, actions, and motivations (Deonna and Teroni 2012: 106–109; Naar 2017a, 2018). Sentiments are not formed by choice or judgment but develop gradually over time, typically through repeated interaction with the thing or person toward which they are directed. The point here isn’t just that a sentiment takes some time to ‘set in’ and that once it has done so it tends to stick around, as a bath might take a long time to fill and a similarly long time to drain. Rather, it’s that any given instance of a sentiment—one person’s love for another, a person’s appreciation of a certain genre of music, another’s distrust of authority—is naturally understood as being shaped by a kind of developmental history, in something like the way that an individual person is shaped by their developmental history (compare Rorty 1987; Grau 2010). Indeed, we might say that a good deal of a person’s being shaped by their history consists in the shaping of their sentiments. One’s love for another person, in this picture, grows, persists, and develops through the course of one’s ongoing interaction with that person, one’s thinking about them, and so on. Love can strengthen as it matures, or it can fade away. An excited romantic love can mature into something deeper but less emotionally intense; romantic love can change into platonic affection; a platonic love between friends can turn into something more romantic. Moreover, if love is a state of this kind, it will naturally tend to persist. It needn’t persist indefinitely, of course—people do

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fall out of love—but it seems doubtful that love needs to be sustained by anything like the lover’s beliefs about why they love the person they love, in the way that we might think a person’s intention to do something must be sustained by beliefs about why they are doing what they are doing. If this is right, it makes a difference to how one person’s love for another will ordinarily be explained. Consider, by way of analogy, traits of character or personality. We tend to think of character as being relatively (not to say completely) fixed, and hence much less ‘fragile’ than attitudes or stances like beliefs or intentions. By the same token, a person’s character is not very ‘responsive’ to such factors as what they believe—including what they believe about how their character ought ideally to be. If you are a very agreeable person, for instance, you will not easily become significantly less agreeable, even if you think it would be better if you were, say because you think you’re too much of a pushover. This relative insensitivity of character to beliefs is reflected in how we tend to think a person’s character should be explained. We have a general picture of what kinds of factors are responsible for character in which a person’s genetic predispositions, their environment, and their experiences—particularly their upbringing and experiences in childhood—as well as the complex interactions between these factors, play major roles. Our picture is one on which character is strongly shaped by events in the individual’s past and by aspects of their biological constitution much more than by their current beliefs. In so far as character is indeed shaped by events in a person’s past in this way, character will be explained developmentally: that is, to make sense of what a person is like now, we need to take a historical view and try to see how they came to be that way. If love is less fragile than belief and intention, if it is the kind of state that develops over time, we might expect it to be rather more like character in this regard too. If so, we should expect love to be less sensitive to presently obtaining facts that might bear on whether it is ‘appropriate’ or ‘fitting’, or to the lover’s present beliefs about such facts. This, in turn, suggests that such facts and beliefs will be less privileged in our explanations of love than they are with respect to action, belief, and emotions. It also suggests that love will be more naturally explained in a historical or developmental way than are things like belief and intention. While this distinction is probably best viewed as one of degree rather than an absolute categorical difference, it is nonetheless significant for our thinking about love and reasons.

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The distinction between these different kinds of explanation can be nicely illustrated by considering an account of reasons for love that might superficially seem to be supported by the idea that love exhibits historical development: Kolodny’s relationship view. Historical relationships play a central role in Kolodny’s account, but still love is not, in the picture he presents, explained historically. The reason one has for loving another person, on Kolodny’s account, is simply the fact that one has a certain kind of relationship with that person. Love is causally sustained by one’s ongoing recognition of that fact. The history itself explains love at best indirectly, through the lover’s belief that there is such a history. The changing character of love over time is explained by the lover’s changing beliefs about the nature of their relationship with their beloved, not directly by the events in which the relationship consists. This contrasts with the idea that events themselves, especially emotionally powerful experiences, leave their marks on us and on our emotional and affective dispositions—marks that do not depend wholly on the sustained influence of beliefs about the events in question.8 The more we see love as explained developmentally, the less it seems to fit the model of reasons-responsiveness outlined earlier: if history is explanatorily significant in this way, the lover’s present beliefs have only limited influence on it. This could be taken to favor a ‘no reasons’ view of love. If we assume that only reasons-responsive attitudes are subject to reasons and, further, that something like our model of reasons-­ responsiveness is correct, this would imply that there are no reasons for love. Indeed, a recent paper by Yongming Han argues against the view that there are justifying reasons (of the kind that he calls ‘fittingness reasons’) for love precisely on the basis that such reasons plausibly do not play an important role in explaining why we love the people we love (Han forthcoming; see also Smuts 2014). Similarly, if reasons-responsiveness is the only way to make sense of the distinction between personal and merely explanatory reasons, then if we doubt love’s responsiveness to reasons, we will thereby doubt the existence of personal reasons for love. One way to try to avoid these skeptical conclusions would, of course, be to insist that love is reasons-responsive, perhaps by seeking to articulate a less demanding account of reasons-responsiveness. I won’t try to assess the prospects for that line of reply here. What I instead want to do, in the final section, is to suggest an alternative way forward. 8  Contrast, with Kolodny’s account, the resolutely historical view of love in, for instance, Grau (2010).

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9.6   Divergent Interests We’ve seen that there are serious difficulties for the idea that love is reasons-­ responsive in the sense outlined in Sect. “A Confluence of Interests: ‘Responding’ to Reasons”. Yet something in the claim that there are no reasons for love rings false. A straightforward explanation of this is that, even if they do not align in the way that they do in the ‘reasons-­ responsiveness’ model, nonetheless the characteristic interests expressed in our talk of reasons—in particular, the interest in interpersonal understanding—do apply to love. Love still, it seems, characteristically ‘makes sense’ for the lover in a distinctively first-personal way, and we might still seek to understand another person’s love from that first-personal perspective. And it is at least not obvious that love’s non-responsiveness to justifying reasons would mean that there was no sense in which love can be more or less appropriate or fitting. However, if love’s responsiveness is indeed limited, if putative justifying reasons do not tend to play the major role in explaining love, then it may be that in order to do justice to the interests expressed in the language of ‘reasons’—to understand what makes love appropriate or inappropriate; to make sense of love from the lover’s perspective—we cannot expect them to fall so neatly together. Adopting this approach would mean refraining from the assumption that there is a unified set of concerns to be addressed through an account of ‘the reasons for love’. Instead, we would recognize that there are questions about justification and appropriateness on the one hand and questions about psychology, phenomenology, and understanding on the other. There might, of course, be connections between these concerns, but the nature of those connections will itself be something that needs to be worked out. Crucially, we would not assume that the interesting psychological aspects of love are necessarily secondary to, or derivative from, facts about what justifies it. The possibility of separating the respective interests of justification and understanding in this way suggests a reexamination of some of the accounts of reasons for love we looked at at the start of this chapter. For instance, one objection we raised against an account like Setiya’s, on which love is justified simply by the other’s mere humanity, was that it fails to give a satisfactory picture of why we love the particular people we love. Perhaps it is simply a mistake to expect that from an account of what justifies love. Objections to an account like Setiya’s would, on this approach, need to take a more directly normative form: for instance, showing that there are some people whom it would be inappropriate to love.

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This approach would also suggest that ‘What are the reasons for love?’ is unlikely to be the most perspicuous framing for the interesting issues concerning our first-personal understanding of love. Once we drop the assumption that love must be made intelligible by apparent justifying reasons, there is no obvious reason to expect that there is one single kind of consideration that makes love intelligible.9 The pressing challenge will be to explain what the ‘intelligibility’ of love consists in if not the kind of subjective justification that, on the reasons-responsiveness picture, constitutes the first-personal intelligibility of intentional action and belief. Note, though, that there is good reason to think that our first-personal perspective on love will be of a different character from that which we have on our beliefs and intentional actions. In as much as love is characteristically explained in historical terms, the facts that explain one’s love for another may be beyond one’s ken in a way that the ‘apparent reasons’ that characteristically explain actions and beliefs are not. In as much as we understand our love for others historically, then, our self-understanding may in this regard involve a much greater degree of speculation, vagueness, and storytelling. However, there is another, perhaps deeper, thought about intelligibility and understanding that we might pursue once we depart from the assumption that love must be made intelligible by (apparent) justifying reasons to which it is a response: namely, that making one’s love intelligible to another may not be primarily a matter of giving an explanation of why one loves—in other words, that personal reasons may not after all be a subset of explanatory reasons. If, for instance, we think of love as involving a kind of appreciation of the beloved, as some authors have suggested, then talking in the right way about what you appreciate in your beloved might help another to understand your perspective as lover in the sense that they can come to see what you see in your beloved (compare de Sousa 2015, chap. 4)—even if such features aren’t major factors in explaining why you love that particular person. In recommending this approach to addressing the set of questions represented by talk of ‘reasons for love’, I don’t mean we should assume that there will be no interesting connections between our interests in justifying, explaining, and understanding love. The suggestion is rather that the differences between love on the one hand and action and belief on the other are great enough and of such a kind that we should not, at least in 9

 Compare Fogal’s (2018) ‘deflationary pluralism’ about motivating reasons for action.

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the first instance, assume that the best way to understand love is to try to fit it into a picture of reasons devised primarily to characterize action and belief. Indeed, given the extent to which the language of ‘reasons’ has come to evoke that kind of picture, a final methodological suggestion might be that this language is, as far as possible, better avoided. Even if we don’t endorse a ‘no reasons’ view of love, we might consider trying out a ‘no “reasons”’ methodology in thinking about it.10

References Abramson, Kate, and Adam Leite. 2011. Love as a Reactive Emotion. The Philosophical Quarterly 61 (245): 673–699. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-­9213.2011.716.x. ———. 2018. ‘Love, Value, and Reasons’. In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Love, ed. by Christopher Grau and Aaron Smuts. Oxford: University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199395729.013.7 Alvarez, Maria. 2010. Kinds of Reasons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chang, Ruth. 2011. Can Desires Provide Reasons for Action? In Reason and Value: Themes From the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz, ed. R. Jay Wallace, Philip Pettit, Samuel Scheffler, and Michael Smith, 56–90. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Davidson, Donald. 1980. Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Sousa, Ronald. 1987. The Rationality of Emotion. London: MIT Press. ———. 2015. Love: A Very Short INTRODUCTION. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Delaney, Neil. 1996. Romantic Love and Loving Commitment: Articulating a Modern Ideal. American Philosophical Quarterly 33 (4): 339–356. Deonna, Julien A., and Fabrice Teroni. 2012. The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction. Abingdon: Routledge.

10  I started work on this chapter while a postdoc at the University of Fribourg, working on the Swiss National Science Foundation-funded project Modes and Contents and as a member of the Thumos research group in the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva. I would especially like to thank Fabrice Teroni for encouraging me to think about some of the issues in this chapter, as well as for encouraging me so much in general. An early version was presented at the Slippery Slope Normativity Summit in Lillehammer, and I would also like to thank the audience at that conference for a number of insightful questions and suggestions. Finally, I am grateful to Simon Cushing for very helpful written comments that greatly improved the quality of the chapter.

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Fogal, Daniel. 2018. Deflationary Pluralism About Motivating Reasons. In The Factive Turn in Epistemology, ed. Veli Mitova. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grau, Christopher. 2010. Love and History. The Southern Journal of Philosophy 48 (3): 246–271. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-­6962.2010.00030.x. Han, Yongming. forthcoming. Do We Love for Reasons? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12638. Hornsby, Jennifer. 2008. A Disjunctive Conception of Acting for Reasons. In Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge, ed. Adrian Haddock and Fiona Macpherson, 244–261. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hyman, John. 1999. How Knowledge Works. Philosophical Quarterly 50 (197): 433–451. Jollimore, Troy. 2011. Love’s Vision. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Keller, Simon. 2000. How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Properties. American Philosophical Quarterly 37 (2): 163–173. Kolodny, Niko. 2003. Love as Valuing a Relationship. The Philosophical Review 112 (2): 135–189. ———. 2005. Why Be Rational? Mind 114 (455): 509–563. https://doi. org/10.1093/mind/fzi509. Korsgaard, Christine M. 1996. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kraut, Robert. 1987. Love De Re. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 10 (1): 413–430. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-­4975.1987.tb00549.x. Lord, Errol. 2018. The Importance of Being Rational. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McDowell, John. 2013. Acting in the Light of a Fact. In Thinking About Reasons: Themes from the Philosophy of Jonathan Dancy, ed. David Bakhurst, Margaret Olivia Little, and Brad Hooker, 13–28. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Na’aman, Oded. 2015. Reasons of Love: A Case Against Universalism About Practical Reason. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 115 (3pt3): 315–322. Naar, Hichem. 2017a. Sentiments. In The Ontology of Emotions, ed. Hichem Naar and Fabrice Teroni, 149–168. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2017b. Subject-Relative Reasons for Love. Ratio 30 (2): 197–214. https://doi.org/10.1111/rati.12128. ———. 2018. Love as a Disposition. In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Love, ed. Christopher Grau and Aaron Smuts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. forthcoming. The Possibility of Fitting Love: Irreplaceability and Selectivity. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-­018-­02079-­4. Parfit, Derek. 2011. On What Matters. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Protasi, Sara. 2016. Loving People for Who They Are (Even when They Don’t Love You Back). European Journal of Philosophy 24 (1): 214–234. https://doi. org/10.1111/ejop.12077.

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Raz, Joseph. 1986. The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1999. Engaging Reason: On the Theory of Value and Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg. 1987. The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love Is Not Love Which Alters Not When It Alteration Finds. Midwest Studies In Philosophy 10 (1): 399–412. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-­4975.1987. tb00548.x. Scanlon, T.M. 1998. What We Owe to Each Other. London: Harvard University Press. Schroeder, Mark. 2007. Slaves of the Passions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Setiya, Kieran. 2014. Love and the Value of a Life. The Philosophical Review 123 (3): 251–280. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-­2683522. Smuts, Aaron. 2014. Normative Reasons for Love, Part II. Philosophy Compass 9 (8): 518–526. Velleman, J. David. 1999. Love as a Moral Emotion. Ethics 109 (2): 338–374. Williamson, Timothy. 2000. Knowledge and Its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wollheim, Richard. 2003. On the Freudian Unconscious. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 77 (2): 23–35. Zangwill, Nick. 2013. Love: Gloriously Amoral and Arational. Philosophical Explorations 16 (3): 298–314. https://doi.org/10.1080/13869795.2013. 812739.

CHAPTER 10

Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Enticing Reasons for Love N. L. Engel-Hawbecker

10.1   Introduction People ordinarily accept what we can call a Reasons view of love: they think we can have more or less good reasons to love one another, and these reasons can move us to do so.1 When we wonder why a friend has fallen in love with someone who is, to us, a repulsive boor, we look for potential reasons she has to do so—considerations that bring out this person’s value and might motivate someone of a healthy mind to love him. Learning of his hidden sweet character, or of the two’s long history together, we begin to understand the emotional investment in this person’s well-being, the vulnerability to his reciprocal regard, and all the other elements of our friend’s love. In this way, we can understand someone’s love (be it for a romantic partner, a friend, or a family member)  For defenses of the Reasons view, see Adams (1999), Keller (2000), Solomon (2001), Kolodny (2003), Velleman (2006), Abramson and Leite (2011, 2017), Jollimore (2011, 2017a, b), Setiya (2014), Brogaard (2015), Naar (2015), Protasi (2016), Hurka (2017), Clausen (2019), and Kroeker (2019). 1

N. L. Engel-Hawbecker (*) Department of Philosophy, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Cushing (ed.), New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72324-8_10

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sympathetically, as we do their beliefs or intentions—by seeing it as a response to reasons for it. This Reasons view of love can seem like common sense at first, but on reflection it can also seem over-intellectualized, even perverse. For example, we ordinarily think that anyone who shares our evidence should be moved to share our beliefs. But if our friend shares with us her reasons for loving the boor, she needn’t jealously suppose that we should develop feelings for him too. For another matter, our friend knows and will continue to meet people who are at least as charming as this boor—people she would then seem to have as good (if not better) reasons to love too or instead. But our friend is not required to reapportion her love whenever someone better walks in the door in the same way that we are required to adjust our beliefs whenever better evidence comes in. This can all seem hard to square with the Reasons view. After all, in each case the reasons for love are supposedly there. If so, anyone who passes up on them would seem to be making a mistake. Reflections like these have encouraged some people to adopt a “No Reasons view” of love, according to which there can be no reasons for love. We can understand this position as being motivated by a simple two-­ premise argument. The first premise—call it “Requiring Reasons”—is that reasons can require people to do what they favor. This idea is familiar enough: whenever the reasons to do something are strong enough, they make it a mistake to do otherwise. The second premise—call it “Love’s Prerogative”—is that nothing can require us to love someone. We are perhaps required to treat certain people lovingly. But if we fail to regard them with love, this is (however unfortunate) no more a mistake than indigestion.2 I will argue that the Reasons view should accept Love’s Prerogative but reject Requiring Reasons. Specifically, I will argue for a version of the Reasons view according to which reasons for love neither require nor justify love. But as the No Reasons view gets right, love does not stand in need of reasons to be permitted; articulations of the Reasons view that think otherwise thereby reveal themselves to misunderstand why reasons for love matter to us. No doubt, this all sounds mysterious. It will become clearer once we see (first) why we should hold onto the Reasons view over 2  This is at least what I take to be the best argument for the No Reasons view. For others, see Hamlyn (1978), Thomas (1991), Frankfurt (2004), Zangwill (2013), Smuts (2014b; MS), de Sousa (2015), and Han (2019).

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the No Reasons view, (second) why we should accept Love’s Prerogative over Requiring Reasons, (third) why a common way of doing this does not work, and (fourth) why reasons for love motivate us to love. Then we will be in a position to answer (finally) any confusions and objections.

10.2   What’s So Good About the Reasons View? The No Reasons view cannot be accused of perversely overintellectualizing love and its pathologies. Nonetheless, it is itself intolerably counterintuitive. As we already noted, we often enough understand one another’s love sympathetically, by considering what reasons might motivate that love. When we understand someone’s love this way, we do so in the same way that we ordinarily understand their beliefs and actions—not in the way we understand why their brow sweats or their hair grows. But if the No Reasons view were correct, this sympathetic understanding would be illusory. Insofar as we can understand the “reasons for” another’s love, it is only through detached, mechanistic explanations. Additionally, we often evaluate particular loves and lovers: if our friend loves the boor because of his hidden virtuous character, we will consider her love and herself to be admirable—less so if the love is based merely on the fun or carnal pleasures the two have together. (This holds for families too: we are disappointed by children who love their parents for the goodies they bring but not for their good character; we are doubly disappointed when parents love their children in the same way.) So much is familiar from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (1155a1–1157b4). It is also somewhat familiar that we want others to have good reasons to love us: despite the hype surrounding unconditional love, we rarely rest content at that, and we strive to be more for others than an occasional relief from boredom and loneliness (Solomon 2001: 155–156). Still less often noted is how much these evaluations matter to us when we look back on our own love life: if in old age we have found no better reasons for love than we had for our high-school affections, we must count ourselves either very lucky or very unfortunate. But, again, if the No Reasons view were correct, all such evaluations would be baseless. We could compare loves through the fruits they bear, but we could not consider any to be more well-rooted than another. Finally, when we hear of purely biological or neurological explanations of love that do not cite good reasons for it, we tend to feel that something essential goes missing. So far as they go, what we have is no more than

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lust, infatuation, or brute attachment. If the terms of these explanations were the only ones available to us, then the possibility of love as something more would seem a mere illusion, disappearing under the microscope. Admittedly, it is hard to say how love is “more” than any concoction of lust, infatuation, and attachment. But I take it that love matters to our lives in a way that these things do not. So the No Reasons view would bar us not only from sympathizing with and evaluating one another’s love: it would seem to prevent us from being able to recognize love in any familiar sense at all. It would leave our world more disenchanted than we have found it. Without the Reasons view, then, certain basic and important parts of our lived experiences would disappear. Perhaps we are doomed to disenchantment, but at present, the No Reasons view forces this upon us only if Requiring Reasons and Love’s Prerogative are both true. We should therefore see if we have any independent reasons to reject either premise.

10.3   The Requiring Reasons View Love’s Prerogative might seem to be the weaker link. Given the worries that motivated the No Reasons view, it can easily seem an overreaction to say, as this premise does, that nothing ever requires anyone to love. True, we are not required to love our friend’s beau, and our friend is not required to love better suitors once she loves the boor. But two measly cases cannot show that love is never required. Perhaps less drastic explanations are available for why love is not required in these cases, leaving open that in others it is a mistake to not love. For instance, while we are not required to love our friend’s beau, this might be because a person’s charms give one a reason to love them only if one is personally acquainted or in a prolonged relationship with them (Velleman 2006: 107; Naar 2015; Protasi 2016; Setiya 2021). So in sharing her reasons for loving the boor, our friend need not think she is giving us any reason to love them too. Reasons for love might be, as philosophers say, “agent-relative.” Similarly, while our friend is not required to change whom she loves, “trading up” whenever someone more charming walks in the door, this might be because her reasons are what philosophers call “exclusionary” or “silencing”: they not only motivate her current love but also take any reasons she has to love others off the table (Jollimore 2011: 82–93 and 2017a: 9–14; cf. Velleman 2006: 98–105).

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This all seems possible. However, such possibilities are not enough to defuse the challenge posed by the No Reasons view. So long as it is also possible that there are other reasons for love that are not agent-relative or exclusionary, it remains possible (given Requiring Reasons) for jealousy or infidelity to still be required of lovers. And it, in fact, seems unlikely that once we love someone, all our reasons to love anyone else are decommissioned. When a lover’s fidelity waivers, it is not likely for no good reason (though of course their reasons might not be good enough). It also seems unlikely that all reasons for love arise from prolonged engagements, so that none were already there and only slowly discovered. Even if someone in a personal relationship has more reasons to love the other party (one reason perhaps being the relationship itself), this does not show that other people can have no reason to love them too. Perhaps reasons for love are not so easy to spot as a person’s good looks. But other plausible reasons (their charisma, intellect, moral fiber, etc.) are not always so hidden as to be appreciable only to a privileged, dedicated few. So to avoid false requirements to love, the mere possibility of agent-­ relative and exclusionary reasons for it is no match for Love’s Prerogative. It would be a match if (and, I think, only if) we could argue that (a) the Reasons view of love is true and (b) it is true only if reasons for love are always agent-relative and exclusionary. But (b) is a mere bluff: the Reasons view of love might be saved by rejecting Requiring Reasons and accepting Love’s Prerogative instead.3

10.4   The Warranting Reasons View To preclude any illicit requirements for jealousy and infidelity, some defenders of the Reasons view have rallied behind the idea that reasons for love can warrant, justify, permit, or make it appropriate, but they never make not loving a mistake. This might be because reasons for love are always counterbalanced by reasons against it: perhaps the distrustfulness of humanity or the threat of heartbreak always gives us sufficient reason to 3  I have focused on two ways to save Requiring Reasons, but the problem generalizes. It is also not enough to say that some reasons for love are personal relationships (Kolodny 2003; Hurka 2017), incomparable values (Velleman 2006), indeterminate developments (Bagley 2015), or organic unities (Clausen 2019). So long as there might be other kinds of reasons for love, Requiring Reasons raises the threat of required jealousy and infidelity. And the possibility of these other reasons cannot be dismissed on the ad hoc grounds that they would cast doubt on the Reasons view committed to Requiring Reasons.

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keep to ourselves. Or, more plausibly, the idea might be that reasons for love are simply not in the business of requiring our love. To require something is to permit it and forbid its absence. But a consideration that speaks in favor of one option need not obviously speak against (let alone forbid) any other. So we should avoid equating the ability to permit a response with the ability to forbid others.4 We might expect, then, that there are considerations with the first ability but not the latter—merely warranting reasons, as we might call them. This naturally leads us to the proposal that reasons for love are of this warranting rather than the requiring sort.5 This Warranting Reasons view, as we might call it, denies Requiring Reasons and accepts Love’s Prerogative. If true, it allows us to maintain all the insights of the Reasons view: we still have reasons for more than lust, infatuation, or attachment; these reasons redound on the quality of our love and our character; and we can still sympathetically understand one another’s love. At the same time, there can be no threat of such reasons ever requiring us to indulge in jealousy or infidelity. The Warranting Reasons view, then, answers the No Reasons view’s challenge. Nevertheless, this approach runs into four problems. The first is that we cannot infer that reasons for love merely warrant it from the fact that it would be nice for the Reasons view if they do. That would be wishful thinking. We again need an independent argument for the claim that all reasons for love must be warranting rather than requiring. Without such an argument, the possibilities of perverse requirements remain, and the No Reasons view will still seem like a necessary revision to common sense. And at this point, the Reasons view cannot rest content with the suggestion that reasons for love are all either warranting, agent-relative, or exclusionary. Once the only way to save common sense becomes so ad hoc, revisionism (here, the No Reasons view) becomes credible. The second problem is that if love needs reasons before it is permitted, there must be something forbidding it. It cannot be forbidden merely by the absence of reasons supporting it: we constantly do all sorts of small things without any reason, yet we do not thereby commit even minor mistakes. Rather, what forbid us from doing something are only ever 4  For more on this idea, see Gert (2003), Greenspan (2005), Little (2013), Scanlon (2014: 107), Little and Macnamara (2017), Darwall (2017), and Whiting (2020). 5  This proposal is made by Adams (1999: 163), Abramson and Leite (2011, 2017), Jollimore (2017a), and Brogaard (2015: 78). Kolodny (2003) and Setiya (2014) both consider (with more or less sympathy, respectively) that reasons for love might be like this; however, they frame this idea in Kagan’s (1989) terminology of “non-insistent reasons.”

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substantive decisive reasons against doing it. So if we say that reasons for love permit it, we must admit that there are otherwise decisive reasons against love. But it is not at all clear there ever are any decisive reasons against love per se (pace Driver 2014). If someone is violent or cruel, that is a good reason to stay away from them but not a decisive reason to stop loving them entirely.6 If someone is a total monster, this seems like a reason to treat them in certain ways so as to prevent them from doing evil.7 Their monstrosity might also be a reason to invest our other emotional resources elsewhere, so that our own well-being is not tethered solely to such an ill-­fated prospect. But these precautions are compatible with loving the “unlovable,” albeit from a sensible distance (literally and figuratively).8 Furthermore, most of us are intimately aware of the reasons we give others not to love us. Yet we hope that we might be loved despite such reasons: we may hope for this even when we think we give another overwhelming reason not to love us. If such love would be wrong on the other’s part, this hope would be perverse. But it is not: what is hoped for is something undeserved but not impermissible—a form of grace, akin to gifted forgiveness and the supererogatory (cf. Darwall 2017: 98). In sum, if there are warranting reasons for love in some cases, there must also be some decisive reasons against loving elsewhere. But it is doubtful that the latter exist. If nothing forbids love, then this absence permits it—not any reasons for love. This brings us to the third problem for the Warranting Reasons view: generally, what permits something and what favors it can be distinct considerations. Consider, for example, a judge’s search warrant. It permits the search of a citizen’s property but does not itself give officers a reason to conduct the search. What favors the search is some probable cause. But a probable cause does not itself make the search appropriate. For another 6  It is often said that love constitutively involves a wish to be near the beloved. But this “truth” is likely a defeasible generic, often defeated in ordinary adult relations. As Velleman (2006: 86) writes, “When divorcing couples tell their children that they still love one another but cannot live together, they are telling not a white lie but a dark truth.” 7  While it is commonly said that lovers want to promote their beloved’s ends on their behalf, this seems to be at most a generic truth, which Ebels-Duggan (2008) argues against at length. So we should not assume that loving a monster requires facilitating their misdeeds. 8  Setiya (2014: 257–258) seems sympathetic to this point. It is also worth bearing in mind that love is compatible with plenty enough hostility (Neu 2000). Because of this, there is an obvious difference between a sensible love for someone despite their flaws and a blind love that ignores or condones such flaws. What is wrong with the latter is not the love but the blind condoning (for a similar point, see Smuts 2014b: 523).

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example, Little and Macnamara (2017) liken warranting reasons to tickets that allow us to board a plane. This analogy is instructively inapt, since tickets do not give us any reason to board a plane: they merely allow one to board. What gives one a reason to board is the destination, yet that does not allow one to board. Just so, what permits love and what counts in favor of it are two separate things. Love is permitted by the absence of anything forbidding it. But this absence does not itself count in favor of love. What does that is some quality of the beloved, their character, one’s shared history with them, one’s potential future with them, or what-have-­ you. And these reasons for love cannot make love further permitted, since permission is, strictly speaking, all or nothing (Maguire 2017: 791–2). So, given that love is already permitted by something that is not itself a reason for love, we cannot say that love is permitted (warranted, justified) by reasons for it.

10.5   The Enticing Reasons View This brings us to the fourth and most important problem with the Warranting Reasons view: by encouraging us to look for justifications for love, it makes us lose sight of what reasons for love do to and for us. The Warranting Reasons view is not alone in this. While everyone agrees that reasons are considerations that favor certain responses, there is a constant temptation to say more than this. For example, it is common to hear that reasons “tell us what we should do, feel or believe” (Kroeker and Schaubroeck 2017: vii; emphasis added; cf. Smuts 2014a: 507). But we might recognize that this is too strong: it precludes the possibility of warranting reasons, which would tell us what we may do without suggesting it would be a mistake to do otherwise. So it might instead be said that “reasons… count in favor of actions by rationalizing and justifying them” (Kroeker 2019: 278, emphasis added; cf. Kroeker and Schaubroeck 2017: viii); we may be told that the “kinds of normative reasons we are after are those of appropriateness. We want to know if love can be justified” (Smuts 2014a: 507; emphasis added). These remarks leave open the possibility of merely warranting reasons. But they still clearly assume—as is common— that reasons can rationalize a response or make it intelligible only if they also justify it, permit it, or make it appropriate. This assumption, however, is falsified by the cases we just saw, where a response is favored and made appropriate (permitted, justified) by two distinct things. For a new example, take games: what permits a move in

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one will be the rules or a referee, but what favors the move will be something like the advantages it brings. To rationalize or make sense of a move, we cite considerations of the latter sort—not the former. But worse than being false, the assumption that reasons favor and rationalize responses only if they help justify it is deeply misleading. It encourages us to conflate a reason’s ability to favor a course of action with its ability to permit it. (This conflation is manifest in the above quote that says reasons favor actions partly by justifying them.) If considerations of value (how something or someone is attractive or unattractive, fun or boring, tasteful or distasteful, etc.) mattered only insofar as they opened up or closed off certain courses of action, then practical reasoning would seem to be no more than the boring application of otherwise pointless rules. (The feeling that it is nothing more than this is likely familiar to anyone who has encountered ethical theorizing modeled on legal theory.) The appeal of any given response then goes missing, and so the point of complying with our reasons reduces to either, “It is the only option left available to me” or, worse, “I had these options open to me, so I had to just pick one.” This is all to say, if the relevance of reasons were exhausted by their ability to erect or remove barriers between what is right and wrong, permissible or not, then their ability to motivate us and make our responses somewhat sympathetic (intelligible, rationalizable) would disappear from sight. By taking reasons to be good only for justifications, we lose sight of why they matter to us and set ourselves up for another sort of disenchantment. We earlier distinguished how a consideration can permit a response from how it can forbid others. These deontic abilities should be distinguished from how a consideration can bring out the value of something. This evaluative ability may operate in tandem with the deontic ones, but it is distinct. A consideration that has the evaluative ability alone can be called an enticing reason, which is in the business of merely “making an option attractive rather than demanded, required, or right” (Dancy 2004: 91).9 9  The language of “enticing reasons” was first introduced by Raz (1999), who doubted their possibility. Their possibility has also been challenged by Robertson (2008) and Nebel (2018) but defended by Dancy (2004) and Little (2013). Since this literature concerns the general question of whether there could be any enticing reasons for anything, it does not provide much help in specifying what specifically we have enticing reasons for. I have already deployed one heuristic implicit in Dancy’s work: if some response is already permitted by the absence of anything forbidding it, then any reasons for it seem to be enticing (unless they are

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If reasons for love were enticing, this would again allow the Reasons view to avoid any illicit requirements for infidelity or jealousy. It would also free the Reasons view of any commitment to find decisive reasons against love, which would need to be counterbalanced before love is permitted. But, as I have repeatedly insisted, it is one thing to demarcate a certain class of reasons and quite another to show that all reasons for love belong to this class. We again need independent evidence showing that all reasons for love must be merely enticing. To find such evidence, we might look to why reasons for love motivate us to love. Presumably, it is no mere coincidence. Rather, these considerations motivate love because they are good reasons for it.10 Does this mean they motivate love because, inter alia, they help permit it? No: even if (per impossibile) these considerations did help permit love, that is not why they motivate it. Permitting love, then, seems to be no part of what it is to be a reason for love, since it does not help explain why such reasons motivate love (assuming they do so because of what they are). Similarly, it does not seem that reasons for love motivate it because they make not loving a mistake: what does that are reasons against not loving (considerations of disvalue), which motivate not love but fear of an unloving life. This fear might dispose us to be more easily moved by our reasons for love, but it is still then just a background catalyst for love—not the real thing. The only obvious option left, then, is that reasons for love motivate it simply because they bring out the value of the would-be beloved. But this seems exactly right. It also makes it no coincidence that reasons for love motivate it: to love someone is to appreciate them in a way, and considerations that bring out their value would be grounds for such appreciation.11 also reasons against every other alternative, which would seem to make them of the requiring sort). The argument below provides another test for enticing reasons. 10  For a defense of this explanatory connection when it comes to believing for good reasons, see Lord and Sylvan (2019). Similar proposals are made by Wedgwood (2006) and Arpaly and Schroeder (2014). If cases of deviant causal motivation seem possible to you, append “in the right way” each time I use “motivate.” 11  Frankfurt (2004: 39) says he “can declare with unequivocal confidence that I do not love my children because I am aware of some value that inheres in them independent of my love for them.” Given the parent–child relation, his love is presumably no mere coincidence. But we are concerned with when it ceases to be a mere coincidence that certain considerations motivate love, and Frankfurt is just denying that his love is motivated at all. He is not chal-

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So permitting or requiring love seems to be no part of why reasons for love motivate it, when they motivate it because of what they are. When we look at why reasons for love as such motivate it, we see them operating as enticing reasons. This indicates that reasons for love are essentially enticing, and so it gives us independent evidence for the Enticing Reasons view of love. Admittedly, this evidence is subtle and delicate, given the perils of extracting normative conclusions from broadly phenomenological observations. The point is just that the Enticing Reasons view has something more to say in its defense than (roughly) it would be nice for the Reasons view if reasons for love were only ever enticing. This something more preempts any accusation that the Enticing Reason view is just an ad hoc revision to common sense, no more plausible than the revision offered by the No Reasons view. And given this evidence that reasons for love are enticing, the No Reasons view cannot fairly press objections that presuppose reasons for love must warrant or require it.

10.6   The Threat of Overgeneralization Perhaps the argument just given for the Enticing Reasons view is not so interesting: it might seem plausible that reasons only ever motivate us insofar as they present us with something of value (or disvalue). If we can infer what reasons are like from how they motivate us, then the argument of the last section would threaten to generalize, showing all reasons to be merely enticing. And if this result is not false, it at least trivializes an Enticing Reasons view of love. To avoid this overgeneralization, it should suffice to find one example of what might, for all we have said, be a non-enticing reason. For a familiar contrast with love, consider respect, in the Kantian sense of regarding another’s humanity as one cannot help but regard one’s own. David Velleman suggests that “respect and love [are] the required minimum and optional maximum responses to one and the same value,” this humanity (2006: 101; cf. Setiya 2014: 262). This suggests that despite stemming from the same value as love, reasons for respect are of the requiring sort. If they are, then we would have to say the following: reasons for us to respect another motivate us to do so because these considerations inter alia make it a mistake not to do so. This is plausible if one thinks (as lenging why reasons for love motivate—only that they motivate it. But the Reasons view anyway says only that reasons for love can motivate it—not that they always do.

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Velleman does, following Kant) that we have a reason to respect others because their humanity is no different from our own. Given this, we would be mistaken to not regard it as we must regard our own: in doing so, we would be regarding something as unlike itself; at least, we would be regarding like cases as unalike. Hence, it would be mere bizarre luck if we were moved to respect others (in the Kantian sense) by good reasons to do so, but not even partly because these considerations show such respect to be required. And it is not unfathomable that the threat of error helps explain why we are moved to respect others in a way that, as Kant puts it, “does not serve my inclination” (2011: 30–31). Respect can be begrudging, reluctant, or, as Kant says, akin to fear, which would make little sense if reasons for respect motivated it simply as considerations of positive value. This account of respect and its reasons might be wrong, but nothing we have said rules it out. And since it entails that reasons for respect are not enticing but requiring, nothing we have said entails that all reasons must be enticing. (Of course, reasons for much else besides respect may not be enticing. Reasons for belief are likely not enticing.)

10.7   The Abundance and Inconstancy of Enticing Reasons Even if one grants the validity of the argument for the Enticing Reasons view, one might think this digs the Reason view in only a deeper hole. After all, the Enticing Reasons view allows that love is always permitted: rampant infidelity, then, would be allowed. Still worse, many people agree that we are sometimes required to treat certain people with partiality. A parent who treats their child no differently than any other obviously does something wrong. A natural way to explain why this partiality is required is by holding that it expresses a love that is required. But on the Enticing Reasons view, love is never required. How, then, could such expressions be? And if we are free to love and not love anyone, in what sense could we owe partiality to specific people and not just whomever we happen to love at the moment? If we need no reasons for love but loving someone can anyway create duties of partiality, then it seems we can rampantly bootstrap duties. At the same time, since we never need to love anyone, we could also illicitly unwind such duties, ceasing to love someone when times get tough.

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Much of these problems can be handled if we first distinguish between reasons for love and reasons of love.12 I have argued that the former are enticing, but I have said nothing about the latter. Reasons of love are ­supposed to include all the reasons that arise in intimate relationships to treat the other party in special ways; these reasons include all the special promises, obligations, and expectations we make and undertake in such relationships. Despite the name, then, it seems likely that reasons of love come not from love per se but from the relevant histories and relationships in which love paradigmatically occurs (Velleman 2006: 108–109; Jeske 2017; Sadler 2017). These reasons could be requiring and would be if, as seems plausible, they reduce to reasons for respect (Smith 2017; Darwall 2017: 99). This is compatible with Love’s Prerogative and the Enticing Reasons view: to repeat an earlier claim, although we are not required to regard others with love, we can be required to treat those closest to us lovingly (cf. Kolodny 2003: n. 6; Driver 2014: 9). But we need not grant the assumption that such partiality is owed because it is an expression of owed love.13 Still, even if a person treats everyone as they should, they might seem to be doing something wrong if their loving regard wavers, say, away from their spouse and toward their neighbor’s. The Enticing Reasons view can admit that this would be unfortunate or disappointing. But so long as this fickle lover in fact behaves themselves, it is not so obvious that they are doing anything wrong. We feel that they truly err, I think, only if we needlessly assume that the burgeoning love for the neighbor’s spouse is romantic. Yet what would be illicit in that case is not the love but the romance—that is, the relationship with its associated behavior. But if again our fickle lover behaves themselves, then we cannot assume their new love is that of an illicit romantic partner rather than that of a mere friend, which would of course be fine.14 12  For more on the latter, see Pettit (1997), Wallace (2012), and the later essays in Kroeker and Schaubroeck (2017). 13  Liao (2015) argues that parents cannot adequately discharge their parental duties without actually loving their children (120–123). His arguments presuppose that to treat their child lovingly enough, unloving parents would need to prevent their child from not just actually but even potentially discovering their lack of love. Liao is likely right to suggest no parent could pull this off, but the requirement is anyway unreasonably excessive. 14  Some assume ‘love’ is wholly ambiguous, and romantic, friendly, and familial love are as distinct emotions as Jack, Bobby, and Ted Kennedy are distinct individuals. I instead assume ‘romantic,’ ‘friendly,’ and ‘familial’ should not be read as the first terms of proper names but

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This handles one half of the infidelity—the new love for others. But something must still be said about the other half—the lost love for one’s partner.

10.8   The Unloving Since reasons for love never make it a mistake to not love, certain terms of criticism seem inapplicable to those who recognize but fail to be moved by them. We cannot call these people mistaken, wrong, unreasonable, irrational, and so on. Jonathan Dancy (2004) says someone who turns down their most enticing option is “silly.” This is not likely what we want to call the unloving. But “silly” seems generally to not be the right label for those who choose the less enticing option: silliness is just a mild form of irrationality; to be irrational is to be mistaken in a way; and enticing reasons (like warranting reasons) do not make one mistaken if one turns them down.15 Rather, as I have suggested, a failure to love is unfortunate and disappointing—what Julia Driver (1992) calls “suberogatory.” This does not show the unloving to be making a mistake, but it does make them appear cold, dull, obstinate, strange, unfeeling, unsympathetic, or even unfortunate themselves. And these seem to me just the sort of criticisms that are generally appropriate for those who knowingly turn down their most enticing option. Perhaps if we were in their position, we expect or at least hope that we would have taken that option. This explains our disappointment and why we struggle to understand them or sympathetically imagine ourselves responding in the same way. But it is noteworthy that we are now speaking mostly about ourselves. It does not follow that the unloving are making a mistake. All that follows is that they are unlike us. While such criticisms seem appropriate for partners who for no reason cease loving one another, these terms might still seem inapt for other failures to love. After all, when our friend continues to love her boor but none of the better suitors who come around, this does not (or anyway as adjectives locating the relationship in which love resides and manifests—hence my assumption that love outside a romance cannot be romantic. Unfortunately, the temptation to think otherwise is all the more entrenched given the common conflation of romantic love with lust or infatuation (which can, of course, occur outside romantic relationships). 15  Perhaps irrationality is not always a mistake. If so, we can call the unloving irrational, but since this would still be misleading, we would need to elaborate: one will have to appeal to other cases where irrationality seems alright, as when Huck Finn can’t bring himself to turn Jim in despite thinking he ought to do so.

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need not) make her appear strange to us. And she will not likely find us unsympathetic or unfortunate just because we do not love her boor too. There are two possible (and compatible) explanations for this. First, it is consistent with the Enticing Reasons view that some reasons for love are agent-relative and exclusionary. So in the cases above, it might be that these failures to love are not failures to indulge one’s enticing reasons, as there are no reasons to indulge.16 This reply, however, is not very interesting: let us set it aside and suppose that in each case, the person who fails to love is genuinely turning down their most enticing option. For the fact that our friend does not seem strange to us, or we to her, can be explained away by our expectation that if we were in each other’s position, we would respond in the same way. We are like one another, and so we can sympathize with one another’s responses. This similarity naturally preempts any accusations of being strange, unsympathetic, cold, and so on. More precisely, it preempts our accusations. It remains conceivable that we and our friend will appear alien and cold in the eyes of universal, agapeic lovers, who are moved by every reason they find to love those they encounter. To them, our failure to love everyone we meet would presumably make us appear unfortunate, since we fail to appreciate the value others bring to our lives. That perspective, while obviously not our own and not required (given the Enticing Reasons view), is not unfathomable. This itself is something any Reasons view should account for, as the Enticing Reasons view does.

10.9   Conclusion A theme of this chapter has been that past defenses of the Reasons view have relied upon a sort of wishful thinking. They provide good arguments for thinking some (perhaps the best) reasons for love are nuanced (e.g. warranting, agent-relative, or exclusionary) in ways that would avoid any false requirements for infidelity or jealousy. But it is hard to find any argument that all reasons for love are like this, independent of the fact that it would be nice for the Reasons view if they all were. Presumably, we can have no credible intuitions about such a general and theoretical claim. Nor 16  The agent-relativity of reasons for love would even seem to be better explained by the Enticing Reasons view. As Dancy (2004: 107) notes, “What is enticing for one person is not for another, and properly so. (This is another interesting aspect of the enticing.)”

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can we credibly claim that whatever lacks these nuances is no reason for love. But without the universal claim, the No Reasons view’s challenge stands. Because of this, I have provided an independent, if modest, argument for the conclusion that reasons for love must be enticing: roughly, reasons are what reasons qua reasons do, and when reasons for love qua reasons for love motivate it, they do so qua enticing reasons. According to this Enticing Reasons view of love, certain considerations count in favor of love, but that is all they do. They neither justify nor require love. That is fine, however, since love is already permitted by the absence of anything forbidding it. To adapt a line of Wittgenstein’s (1953: Sect. 289), to love without a justification does not mean to love wrongfully. In this respect, the Enticing Reasons view agrees with the No Reasons view. There is something amiss in defending love or feeling the need to. From this, the No Reasons view seems to conclude that nothing can be said for love in any particular case. But this inference falsely assumes that reasons for love must be potential justifications for it. Love does not need reasons to justify it (as the No Reasons view recognizes), but this does not mean there cannot still be any considerations favoring and motivating it. Nor does it follow that these considerations cannot be reasons for love. They do exactly what we would expect such reasons to do: they help us sympathetically understand one another’s love as we do their beliefs and actions; they redound on the quality of love and lovers; and they let us live in a world where there is more to affection than superficial lust and brute biological attachments. The No Reasons view might rightly accuse past articulations of the Reasons view of overintellectualizing love, but all parties to this dispute are guilty of overintellectualizing (or in any case overthinking) what reasons for love must be like. They are just considerations of value, and that is as much as we want. This brings out a second theme of this chapter, which echoes Plato’s suggestion (in Book VII of the Republic) that the hardest thing for us to look at is the Form of the Good: instead of seeing its true nature, we are more likely to shy away and dwell on mere proxies. It is perhaps not so surprising that we might similarly shy away from love itself (Cavell 1969). In any case, I have argued that something like this occurs when we try to look closely at reasons for love. Instead of staring down considerations of value, we often divert our attention to permissions instead. This threatens to make us lose sight of love as we know it. But the problem, then, is not that we are trying to view love as a response to reasons. The problem is that instead of maintaining a Reasons view of love, we quickly back down

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and try to see it in view of something else—justifications or requirements. So this failure does not suggest that a No Reasons view of love is needed to properly appreciate it; given the No Reasons view, it is not clear what we would even have to appreciate. Rather, as we began by noting, we get a view on love by looking at reasons for it.17

References Abramson, Kate, and Adam Leite. 2011. Love as a Reactive Emotion. The Philosophical Quarterly 61 (145): 673–699. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1467-­9213.2011.716.x. ———. 2017. Love, Value, and Reasons. In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Love, ed. Christopher Grau and Aaron Smuts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199395729.013.7. Adams, Robert Merrihew. 1999. Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Arpaly, Nomy, and Timothy Schroeder. 2014. In Praise of Desire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bagley, Benjamin. 2015. Loving Someone in Particular. Ethics 125: 477–507. Brogaard, Berit. 2015. On Romantic Love: Simple Truths about a Complex Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cavell, Stanley. 1969. The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear. In Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press. Clausen, Ginger T. 2019. Love of Whole Persons. The Journal of Ethics 23: 347–367. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-­019-­09299-­x. Dancy, Jonathan. 2004. Enticing Reasons. In Reason and Value: Themes from Joseph Raz, ed. R.  Jay Wallace, Philip Pettit, Samuel Scheffler, and Michael Smith, 91–118. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Darwall, Stephen. 2017. Love’s Second-Personal Character: Reciprocal Holding, Beholding, and Upholding. In Love, Reasons and Morality, ed. Esther Engels Kroeker and Katrien Schau-broeck, 93–109. New York: Routledge. Driver, Julia. 1992. The suberogatory. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 70 (3): 286–295. ———. 2014. Love and Duty. Philosophic Exchange, 44(1). Ebels-Duggan, Kyla. 2008. Against Beneficence: A Normative Account of Love. Ethics 119 (1): 142–170. 17  This chapter has been greatly helped by discussions with Ray Buchanan, Sophie Cote, Simon Cushing, Bryce Dalbey, Jonathan Dancy, Julia Driver, Matt Evans, Kathleen Higgins, Emilie Pagano, and David Sosa.

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Frankfurt, Harry. 2004. The Reasons of Love. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gert, Joshua. 2003. Requiring and Justifying: Two Dimensions of Normative Strength. Erkenntnis 59: 5–36. Greenspan, Patricia. 2005. Asymmetrical Practical Reasons. In Experience and Analysis: Proceedings of the 27th International Wittgenstein Symposium, ed. M.E. Reicher and J.C. Marek, 387–394. Vienna: ÖBV & HPT. Hamlyn, D.W. 1978. The Phenomena of Love and Hate. Philosophy 53: 5–20. Han, Yongming. 2019. Do We Love For Reasons? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12638. Hurka, Thomas. 2017. Love and Reasons: The Many Relationships. In Love, Reasons and Morality, ed. Esther Engels Kroeker and Katrien Schaubroeck, 163–180. New York: Routledge. Jollimore, Troy. 2011. Love’s Vision. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2017a. Love as ‘Something in Between’. In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Love, ed. Christopher Grau and Aaron Smuts. Oxford, Oxford University Press. ———. 2017b. Love: The Vision View. In Love, Reasons and Morality, ed. Esther Engels Kroeker and Katrien Schaubroeck, 1–19. New York: Routledge. Kagan, Shelly. 1989. The Limits of Morality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 2011. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Mary Gregor and Jens Timmerman. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Keller, Simon. 2000. How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Properties. American Philosophical Quarterly 37 (2): 163–173. Kolodny, Niko. 2003. Love as Valuing a Relationship. The Philosophical Review 112 (2): 135–189. Kroeker, Esther Engels. 2019. Reasons for Love. In The Routledge Handbook to the Philosophy of Love, ed. Adrienne M. Martin, 277–287. New York: Routledge. Kroeker, Esther Engels, and Katrien Schaubroeck. 2017. Love, Reasons and Morality. New York: Routledge. Liao, S. Matthew. 2015. The Right to Be Loved. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Little, Margaret Olivia. 2013. In Defense of Non-Deontic Reasons. In Thinking About Reasons: Themes from the Philosophy of Jonathan Dancy, ed. David Bakhurst, Brad Hooker, and Margaret Olivia Little, 112–136. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Little, Margaret Olivia, and Coleen Macnamara. 2017. For Better or Worse: Commendatory Reasons and Latitude. In Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, ed. Mark Timmons, vol. 7, 138–160. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lord, Errol, and Kurt Sylvan. 2019. Prime Time (for the Basing Relation). In In Well-Founded Belief: New Essays on the Basing Relation, ed. J. Adam Carter and Patrick Bondy. New York: Routledge.

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Maguire, Barry. 2018. There Are No Reasons for Affective Attitudes. Mind 127 (507): 779–805. Naar, Hichem. 2015. Subject-Relative Reasons For Love. Ratio 30: 197–214. https://doi.org/10.1111/rati.12128. Nebel, Jacob M. 2018. Normative Reasons as Reasons Why We Ought. Mind 128 (510): 459–484. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzy013. Neu, Jerome. 2000. A Tear is an Intellectual Thing: The Meanings of Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pettit, Philip. 1997. Love and Its Place in Moral Discourse. In Love Analyzed, ed. Roger E. Lamb, 153–164. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Protasi, Sara. 2016. Loving People for Who They Are (Even When They Don’t Love You Back). European Journal of Philosophy 24 (1): 214–234. https://doi. org/10.1111/ejop.12077. Raz, Joseph. 1999. Explaining Normativity: Reason and the Will. In Engaging Reason, 90–117. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robertson, Simon. 2008. Not So Enticing Reasons. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 11: 263–277. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-­007-­9091-­5. Scanlon, T.M. 2014. Being Realistic About Reasons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Setiya, Kieran. 2014. Love and the Value of a Life. Philosophical Review 123 (3): 251–280. ———. 2021. Other People. In The Value of Humanity: A Re-Evaluation, ed. Sarah Buss and Nandi Theunissen. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Michael. 2017. The ‘What’ and ‘Why’ of Love’s Reasons. In Love, Reasons and Morality, ed. Esther Engels Kroeker and Katrien Schaubroeck, 145–162. New York: Routledge. Smuts, Aaron. 2014a. Normative Reasons for Love, Part II. Philosophical Compass 9 (8): 518–526. ———. 2014b. manuscript. In Defense of the No-Reasons View of Love. Obtained October 2018 from https://philpapers.org/rec/SMUIDO. Accessed August 17, 2020. Solomon, Robert. 2001. On Love. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. de Sousa, Ronald. 2015. Love: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thomas, Laurence. 1991. Reasons for Love. In The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love, ed. Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins, 467–476. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Velleman, J. David. 2006. Love as a Moral Emotion. In Self to Self: Selected Essays, 70–109. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press. Wallace, R.  Jay. 2012. Duties of Love. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary 86: 175–198. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-­8349. 2012.00213.x.

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Wedgwood, Ralph. 2006. The Normative Force of Reasoning. Noûs 40 (4): 660–686. Whiting, Daniel. 2020. Aesthetic Reasons and the Demands They Do (Not) Make. The Philosophical Quarterly pqaa045. https://doi.org/10.1093/ pq/pqaa045. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M.  Anscombe, P.M.S.  Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, 4th ed. Wiley-­ Blackwell: West Sussex (UK). Zangwill, Nick. 2013. Love: Gloriously Amoral and Arational. Philosophical Explorations 16 (3): 298–314. https://doi.org/10.1080/1386979 5.2013.812739.

CHAPTER 11

Love, Motivation, and Reasons: The Case of the Drowning Wife Monica Roland

11.1   Introduction We commonly take ourselves to have good reasons for promoting the interests and well-being of our loved ones. As a parent, for instance, you do not question whether you have reasons to provide for your young children on a daily basis, and as a friend, you do not check to see whether you have reasons to support your friend in grief. Taking oneself to have reasons for benevolent acts on behalf of loved ones thus seems to be an essential part of loving them. A more controversial issue in the philosophical literature on love, however, is what the nature of those reasons is. For one thing, there is disagreement about the source of those reasons. What exactly provides us with reasons for benevolent acts on behalf of loved ones? A different, but related, question is how these reasons relate to other reasons for benevolent acts, such as moral reasons. I address these questions here by considering Harry Frankfurt’s (2004) and David Velleman’s (1999) respective accounts of love, with a particular focus on their responses to one of the most well-known thought

M. Roland (*) Oslo Metropolitan University, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Cushing (ed.), New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72324-8_11

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experiments in moral philosophy, namely, Bernard Williams’s (1981) hypothetical case of the drowning wife. This case is about a man who sees two people on the verge of drowning, where one of them is his wife and the other is a stranger, but where the man can save only one of them and naturally wants to save his wife. Most responses to the case, including Williams’s discussion of it, have primarily been concerned with the justificatory basis for the husband’s preference and the particular difficulties encountered by impartial moral theory in trying to legitimate his preference. I will also be concerned with the husband’s reasons for saving his wife over the stranger in this case. However, my aim here is not first and foremost to contribute to the debate on impartial morality, but rather to bring out what the case can tell us about love, in particular the relation between loving someone and the reasons we have for acting on behalf of those loved ones. As a preliminary, I begin by outlining the main problems provided by the case of the drowning wife. Next, I will present Frankfurt’s and Velleman’s responses to the case and point out what I take to be problematic about these responses. Both responses, I shall argue, neglect the intimate relation between love and special relationships. I then proceed to provide an argument for the claim that our reasons for benevolent acts on behalf of loved ones are provided by the same things we essentially value in love, namely, the inherent moral value of our beloveds and the special relationships we have with them.1 I close with a discussion on special relationships and special reasons.

11.2   The Case of the Drowning Wife Even though it was Williams’s discussion of the case that brought it to the attention of a broader philosophical audience, the case of the drowning wife first occurred in the work of Charles Fried (1970). Fried, who’s an 1  On my account, what we essentially value in love is not just the inherent moral value of the beloved and the relationship one has with the beloved. When it comes to especially romantic love and friendship, we also value the beloved’s laudable relational qualities (or laudable moral character traits, broadly speaking). Mutual appreciation of such qualities is constitutive of romantic relationships and friendships. However, the aim of this chapter is not to account for the relation between what we value in love and the reasons for love, but rather the relation between loving someone and the reasons lovers have for promoting the good of the beloved. My focus here will thus not be on laudable relational qualities as such, but on special relationships and the inherent value of the beloved. See otherwise my discussion on reasons for love in my PhD thesis (2016), especially pp. 83–109.

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advocate of Kantian moral theory, points out that the requirements of impartial moral principles seem to commit agents to always weigh the lives of strangers and loved ones equally. This, he admits, provides the Kantian with a problem in cases such as the one with the drowning wife, since it would be absurd to insist that the husband should treat the wife and the stranger equally, for instance, by flipping a coin in order to decide whom to rescue. As a solution to this problem, Fried suggests that as long as the husband does not occupy any official position (i.e. as a lifeguard or the captain of a ship), then “the occurrence of the accident may itself stand as a sufficient randomizing event to meet the dictates of fairness, so he may prefer his friend, or loved one” (227). He adds, furthermore, that if the husband did occupy an official position, for instance, if he was the captain of a ship, then “the argument that he must overlook personal ties is not unacceptable” (ibid.). Williams was puzzled by Fried’s remarks on the husband’s reasons. Here is the key passage in which he discusses the case: […] surely this is a justification on behalf of the rescuer, that the person he chose to rescue was his wife? It depends on how much weight is carried by ‘justification’: the consideration that it was his wife is certainly, for instance, an explanation which should silence comment. But something more ambitious than this is usually intended, essentially involving the idea that moral principle can legitimate his preference, yielding the conclusion that in situations of this kind it is at least all right (morally permissible) to save one’s wife […] But this construction provides the agent with one thought too many: it might have been hoped by some (for instance, by his wife) that his motivating thought, fully spelled out, would be the thought that it was his wife, not that it was his wife, and that in situations of this kind it is permissible to save one’s wife. (1981: 18)

Numerous philosophers have since commented on the case and discussed Williams’s remarks on the husband with “one thought too many.”2 Even though there are various ways of formulating the problems brought out by the case, the debate seems in particular to have been centered on three main questions. For one thing, the case raises the question of why the husband is right to save his wife. That is, what justification does he 2  See, for example, Elinor Mason (1999), David Velleman (1999), Harry Frankfurt (2004), Marcia Baron (2008), Troy Jollimore (2011, especially pp.  30–35), Susan Wolf (2012), Simon Keller (2013), and Nicholas Smyth (2018).

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have for his preference? This is what Nicholas Smyth (2018) has named the justification problem. Smyth points out: “Ideally, [an answer to this question] should not merely involve establishing that he is permitted to rescue her, it also involves establishing that there are positive reasons in favor of his action” (4). For another, one could ask why thoughts of justification even should enter the husband’s mind in such a situation. Many consider this to be the main question raised by Williams in the aforementioned famous passage. Third and lastly, one could also ask how the reasons that justify the husband’s preference are represented or integrated in the husband’s actual motivations and dispositions. Smyth labels this the integration problem. These questions will also serve as a backdrop for my discussion here, as I proceed to explore the relation between our reasons for acting on behalf of loved ones and the love we have for them.

11.3   The Husband with One Thought Too Many So what exactly can the case of the drowning wife tell us about love and our reasons for benevolent acts on behalf of loved ones? For one thing, it tells us something about our expectations regarding the husband’s psychological makeup. Most responses to the case take for granted that the reference to the husband and the wife is meant to indicate that he loves her and that he is compellingly motivated to save his wife over the stranger precisely because he loves her and not the stranger. Moreover, the case also tells us something about our expectations regarding the explicit content of the husband’s motivating thought. As we have seen, Williams argues that any thoughts by the husband about justification for saving his wife over the stranger surely would be “one thought too many.” On Williams’s account, it would be somewhat inappropriate for the husband to look for justification for his preference. However, in an illuminating paper on the case, Susan Wolf points out that “Williams does not himself call attention to the difference between the case of the husband who thinks at the time of action about what is morally permissible for him to do and a different case in which one wonders, retrospectively or counterfactually, what would be morally permissible and why” (2012: 74). Nevertheless, she argues, most responses take for granted that Williams talks about the former case, and the standard view among those responses seems to be in agreement with Williams in that— in this very case—reflection about permissibility at the time of the situation

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would be one thought too many.3 It would be, Wolf argues, “something unpalatable about a man who, faced with his drowning wife in one direction from his lifeboat and a drowning stranger in the other, checks to see whether it is morally permissible before paddling (or diving) toward his wife” (ibid.). Just as a lack of motivation to save the wife seems incompatible with love, so it seems, is reflection in the heat of the situation about permissibility to save the wife over the stranger. We expect some sort of automaticity in this particular case and automaticity leaves no room for that sort of reflection. Let me note, however, that this is not unique for love. If there were just one person out in the water—a stranger—most of us, I believe, would think that it would be one thought too many also for the moral agent if he had to reflect about whether he has a reason to rescue the drowning stranger. It would be something unpalatable also about someone who had to check whether he should save a stranger from drowning, or whether it is permissible not to save the stranger and just walk away. We expect some sort of automaticity also in cases that do not involve love as such, that is, cases in which we do not love the other person. Automaticity might be expected in many, perhaps even most, cases involving loving agents, but it does so, I believe, also for many cases involving merely moral agents. Nevertheless, even if we expect of the husband that he does not think about justifying reasons at the time of action, that, in fact, thinking about reasons in the heat of the situation would be incompatible with him loving his wife, many philosophers still want to provide justification for his partiality. That is, it is one thing to oppose the idea that the husband should think of reasons at the time of the situation, another to oppose the idea that there are reasons that legitimate the husband’s preference. Thus, if the husband should save his wife, what is the justification for him doing

3  In response to Wolf’s claim here, Nicholas Smyth argues that Williams clearly talks about permissibility at the time of the situation. He says, “Though some of his defenders have sought to smooth over this fact, his references to the husband’s ‘motivating thought’ make it very clear that Williams was specifically worried about how Kantian theory will require us to think and feel when we are acting” (2018: 4). Even though I agree with Smyth’s observation here that Williams was talking about the husband’s thoughts at the moment of the situation, I still think Wolf has a valid point. When we talk about the husband’s reasons in this case, there is an important difference between (1) the husband’s motivation and thoughts at the time of action and (2) thinking about justification for his preference retrospectively (or counterfactually).

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so? What provides him with overriding reasons for rescuing the wife rather than the stranger? I will now turn to the ways in which Frankfurt and Velleman have responded to the case. Frankfurt and Velleman offer two different solutions to the aforementioned questions: While Frankfurt argues that the husband’s reason for saving his wife over the stranger is given by his love for her, Velleman insists that the husband’s reason for saving his wife in this case has nothing essentially to do with love, but is rather provided by their relationship.

11.4   Frankfurt’s Response Consider these passages in which Frankfurt reflects on the famous thought experiment: […] the example as [Williams] presents it is significantly out of focus. It cannot work the way he intends, if what is stipulated concerning one of the drowning people is merely that she is the man’s wife. After all, suppose that for quite good reasons the man detests and fears his wife. Suppose that she detests him too, and that she has recently engaged in several viciously determined attempts to murder him. Or suppose that it was nothing but a cold-­ bloodedly arranged marriage of convenience anyhow, and that they have never ever been in the same room together except during a perfunctory two-minute wedding ceremony thirty years ago. Surely, to specify nothing more than a bare legal relationship between the man and the drowning woman misses the point. (2004: 36–37) If he does truly love her, then he necessarily already has that reason. It is simply that she is in trouble and needs his help. Just in itself, the fact that he loves her entails that he takes her distress as a more powerful reason for going to her aid than for going to the aid of someone about whom he knows nothing. The need of his beloved for help provides him with this reason, without requiring that he think of any additional considerations and without the interposition of any general rules […] If the man does not recognize the distress of the woman he loves as a reason for saving her rather than the stranger, then he does not genuinely love her at all. Loving someone or something essentially means or consists in, among other things, taking its interests as reasons for acting to serve those interests. Love is itself, for the lover, a source of reasons. It creates the reasons by which his acts of loving concern and devotion are inspired. (37)

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As Frankfurt rightfully points out here, neither bare legal relationships—for instance, the mere fact that two people are married—nor unloving or hateful relationships do generally provide reasons for partisan actions on behalf of the other. However, Frankfurt does not consider the possibility that loving relationships can provide reasons for partiality in action, and I find it a bit surprising that he does not address that issue specifically or in more detail, since that should be our starting point.4 As already argued, we should take for granted that the husband and the wife in this very case do share a history of mutual concern and love for one another. The reference to their relationship is thus not just a reference to their legal relationship, but also to their historical relationship and the loving character of it, and thus not irrelevant for the case. A loving relationship is a very real thing in the world, and it seems very plausible that loving relationships are normatively significant. Why shouldn’t they be? As, for instance, Niko Kolodny (2003) points out: If you are waiting for the outcome of your mother’s surgery, and a hospital volunteer asks you why you are so worried about this patient in particular, then the natural reply would be: “Because she’s my mother.” Reference to the relationship provides a reason that makes your behavior at least as intelligible, permissible, and appropriate as if you said, “Because I love her.” On Frankfurt’s account, however, it seems that only the latter reply refers to a reason for your behavior. I think that is a problematic view. That being said, I agree with Frankfurt that the husband qua lover does not need to reflect in the heat of the moment about what reasons there are for saving his wife in order to be compellingly motivated to do so or for generally being aware of reasons for such an act. As argued earlier, his love for his wife explains his motivation for saving her in particular, and if asked later on (after the incident) he will surely have access to reasons for rescuing her. But I see no argument on Frankfurt’s behalf for why that necessarily excludes the possibility that loving relationships can be normatively 4  One could argue, in Frankfurt’s defense, that loving relationships might be what he has in mind when objecting to the idea that reference merely to the fact that she is the man’s wife misses the point, since that fact does not reveal anything about the quality of the relationship or whether they love each other. Thus, he could be understood as saying that not any type of relationship provides reasons, merely loving or benevolent relationships. However, in the remainder of his discussion on Williams’s thought experiment, he does not refer to loving relationships as reasons, nor does he say anything about the relation between relationships and love. Rather, Frankfurt refuses to give relationships a prominent role in his account of love.

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significant. Rather, as already suggested, the absence of explicit reflection on reasons at the time of the situation does not need to have any bearing on what reasons there are for preference in this case. Furthermore, automaticity in such cases might in itself be a manifestation of internalized reasons that govern an agent’s actions without it being the case that he consciously reflects upon them when he acts. The problem, as I see it, with Frankfurt’s response is thus twofold. For one thing, he rejects the possibility that loving relationships are normatively significant, without providing a good argument for such a rejection. This is, of course, not in itself an argument against Frankfurt’s positive claim that love provides reasons for partiality, but it is an argument against accepting his negative claim—his rejection of special relationships, such as spousal relationships, as legitimate sources of partiality—without further inquiry. For another, Frankfurt ignores the constitutive role lovers’ valuation of their relationships with their loved ones have for love. Loving someone, I argue, is, in part, to value the relationship you have with that person. This, again, might have implications for how we should understand the claim that love creates reasons.

11.5   Velleman’s Response Velleman has a different response to Williams’s hypothetical case from Frankfurt’s. In his account, the husband’s reasons for saving his wife over the stranger have nothing essentially to do with his love for her. He says: Of course the man in Williams’s story should save his wife in preference to strangers. But the reasons why he should save her have nothing essentially to do with love […] The grounds for preference in this case include, to begin with, the mutual commitments and dependencies of a loving relationship. What the wife should say to her husband if he hesitates about saving her is not “What about me?” but “What about us?” That is, she should invoke their partnership or shared history rather than the value placed on her by his love. Invoking her individual value in the eyes of love would merely remind him that she was no more worthy of survival than the other potential victims, each of whom can ask “What about me?” (1999: 373)

I have several comments on Velleman’s response here. The first comment concerns the source of reasons in normal cases of benevolent acts on behalf of loved ones, the second comment concerns the source of reasons

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in this particular case, and the third concerns the relation between love and loving relationships. However, in order to bring some context to the aforementioned quote and the following discussion, I will first say a few words about Velleman’s account of love. According to Velleman, love is a moral emotion, and it is moral in the sense that it necessarily involves the moral attitude of respect. Now, in ordinary language the word “respect” has a number of different, though related, meanings. For instance, it might express a sort of appraisal or admiration for someone in virtue of their character, skills, or achievements.5 However, the word can also refer to a type of attitude we should have toward all persons regardless of their merits, social status, and character. All persons, it seems, are entitled to a certain type of respect simply in virtue of being persons. This idea grounds most contemporary thought in moral philosophy, and it is this meaning of the word that lies at the heart of Velleman’s account as well.6 For Velleman, love and respect alike are responses to a value we all share, namely our inherent moral value as ends in ourselves. However, whereas respect is an attitude we should have toward everyone in virtue of this value, there are no such moral requirements on love. He says, “I regard respect and love as the required minimum and optional maximum responses to one and the same value” (366). One implication of the view that love and respect alike are responses to the inherent value of persons is that both have significant impact on our wills (i.e., on our motivations and dispositions). In the Kantian framework Velleman assumes, ends in themselves have value for their own sake, and the recognition of this inherent value of others forces us to treat them as sources of valid claims. For respect, the impact of such recognition on our wills is predominantly negative; it constrains what we can do to other people; it arrests our egoistic inclinations to use others as mere means for our own ends. But respect can also be a source of positive motivation and duties, such as in situations where one is in a position to save strangers from drowning. For the case of love, however, the impact on our wills is not primarily negative, though it certainly is an essential part of love that 5  The example is in no way meant to be an exhaustive analysis of different types of respect or of the various uses of the word in natural language. For a more detailed discussion on the matter, see, for instance, Stephen L. Darwall (1977), Carla Bagnoli (2006), and the introductory section of John J. Drummond (2006). 6  Thus, it is possible to lose respect for someone, in the sense that one no longer admires their moral character or respects their political views, but still has respect for them in the sense that one acknowledges their inherent moral value and thus their humanity.

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one does not use the other as mere means to pursue one’s own interests. Rather, according to Velleman, love is to a greater extent than mere respect a source of positive motivation in that it results in a “heightened sensitivity to the other’s interests” (361). Loving someone involves a motivational disposition to promote their interests and well-being—in some cases on a daily basis. With this in mind, we can now look at some of the implications of Velleman’s view. The source of reasons in normal cases of benevolent acts on behalf of loved ones: For one thing, it seems that Velleman is committed to the view that the basic reason for benevolent acts on behalf of any person—loved ones or strangers—derives from their inherent moral value. The inherent value of others provides us with basic reasons for acting well toward them, in particular when such acts are needed. Thus, for the husband in Williams’s hypothetical case, the basic reason for saving his wife is the same as the basic reason for saving the stranger; it is grounded in their inherent value as ends in themselves. This, of course, lies at the heart of the very problem; their inherent value cannot provide justification for preference. Velleman’s caution against invoking the wife’s individual value reflects this very point.7 Second and following from this, Velleman thus seems committed to the view that one’s basic reason in general for acting on behalf of loved ones essentially has something to do with love. In normal cases, what we essentially value in love, according to Velleman, namely the inherent value of the beloved, is also the source of our basic reason for acting well toward them. Lovers’ basic reasons for promoting the good of their beloveds are grounded in their beloveds’ inherent moral value. Third, it seems, however, that the inherent moral value of our beloveds is not the only significant normative factor in cases concerning benevolent acts on their behalf. If special relationships can provide reasons for partiality in cases such as the one with the drowning wife, I see no reason why they cannot do so in normal cases as well. For one thing, being in a loving relationship with someone will give you unique insight into the needs and interests of that particular person, as well as the opportunity and perhaps even skill to promote their interests specifically. This seems to provide you 7  Following Kant, Velleman holds the view that the inherent value of persons is different from the value of other things in that it does not allow for comparisons among alternatives. Persons have the value of dignity, while other things have the value of price, which do allow for comparisons. Thus, in cases where one has to choose between saving one person over the other, the decision of whom to choose must be made on the basis of other factors than the incomparable value of dignity that they both share.

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in particular with reasons to promote such goods. Velleman would presumably not object to the claim that special relationships provide lovers with reasons for benevolent acts on behalf of loved ones also in normal cases. However, based on his comment in the aforementioned quote, he still seems to reject the claim that lovers’ appreciation of such relationships is part of the very attitudes that constitute their love. I think that is an odd position and I will explore this point in more detail. The source of reasons in Williams’s thought experiment: Velleman seems to think that this case differs from normal cases of benevolent acts on behalf of loved ones, on the grounds that in this case what is valued in love and the reasons for acting on the motives of love come apart. It is not the wife’s inherent value that provides the husband with reasons for saving her, Velleman stresses, but their relationship. I think this claim is in need of clarification. For one thing, Velleman’s wording in the aforementioned quote—“the reasons why he should save her have nothing essentially to with love”—is inaccurate, or at least ambiguous. If what I have argued earlier is correct, then it follows that Velleman is committed to the view that the basic reason for saving the wife has something to do with love. Both love and the basic reason for saving her are grounded in her inherent value. It is the reason for preference that according to Velleman has nothing to do with love. That is, if love is merely a response to the beloved’s inherent moral value, then referring to their spousal relationship as a source of reasons for preference is a reference to something external to love.8 However, as I have already argued, there are reasons to think that love is not merely a response to the beloved’s moral value. If the husband in this case considers their spousal relationship a reason for saving her over a stranger with whom he does not share such a relationship, it follows that he values that very relationship. Taking the relationship to provide such a reason is to value it. Furthermore, as I will argue for in more detail later, his valuation of the relationship seems to be an essential part of his love for his wife. It is his relationship with his wife—understood as their shared 8  This is precisely the problem for impartial morality, as well. If the reasons for moral acts on behalf of others are grounded in their inherent value and nothing else, then it seems that morality cannot help us decide whom to choose in this case, just that we are morally required to rescue one of them or as many as we can. If Velleman holds such a view, then it seems that on his account both love and morality fall short in providing justification for saving the wife over the stranger in this case. This might have been what Williams had in mind when he said, “some situations lie beyond justifications” (1981: 17).

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history together—that makes her irreplaceable to him. On these grounds, I am thus skeptical to the claim that lovers’ appreciation of their relationships with their loved ones is not part of the very attitudes that constitute their love and thus, by extension, that the source of justification for preference in this case comes apart from what is valued in love. This brings me to my last comment in this section regarding Velleman’s response to Williams’s thought experiment. The relation between love and loving relationships: The question of what we essentially value in love—that is, what love essentially is a response to—is hotly debated in the philosophical literature. Just like Velleman, I hold the view that love is a response to the inherent moral value of the beloved. Note that this is not a claim about causality, and thus what elicits love. Rather, it is a claim about one of the essential attitudes of love. Love, I argue, necessarily involves the moral attitude of respect. You cannot love someone without acknowledging their value as ends in themselves. This implies for one thing that when we love someone our interest in the other is not primarily instrumental. Rather, we care about the person as someone that is important for their own sake. Furthermore, I also believe that recognition of the beloved’s moral value involves taking that value to be a source of basic reasons for benevolent acts on their behalf. However, unlike Velleman, I argue for what we could label a “dual account of love.” Loving someone is not merely a valuation of a generic value we all share, but also a valuation of particulars, such as the particular relationship one has with the beloved. After all, it is our relationships with our loved ones that make them special to us. Thus, if love is essentially selective, it must be reflected in its constitutive attitudes. It cannot just be a valuation of a generic feature, but also of features that distinguish the beloved from others, such as the special relationship one has with the beloved. Moreover, valuing the relationship one has with a beloved involves seeing that relationship as a source of special reasons for acting for the good of that person—reasons that typically do not apply to others who are not in such a relationship with one’s beloved. On these grounds, I thus take issue with what seems to me to be an artificial distinction in Velleman’s account between love and the lover’s valuation of the relationship. Velleman lacks an argument for why the husband’s valuation of the relationship he has with his wife is a different psychological phenomenon than the love he has for her.

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11.6   The Possibility of a Moral Account of Love In the earlier discussion, I have suggested that what we essentially value in love is both the inherent moral value of the beloved and the special relationship one has with the beloved. Furthermore, I have also suggested that our reasons for beneficial acts on behalf of loved ones are provided by the same things we value in love. The inherent moral value of the beloved provides the lover with basic reasons for beneficial acts on his or her behalf and the special relationship one has with the beloved provides the lover with special reasons for such acts. This duality of love suggests that love, at least in part, is a moral emotion, and furthermore, that our basic reasons for good deeds on behalf of loved ones have a moral basis. While Velleman argues for a moral account of love, Frankfurt is more resistant to the idea that love is inherently moral. This skepticism rests on his view that love is not a result of moral reasoning or an awareness of a moral value in the beloved, and, furthermore, his view that love and morality are two different sources of normativity. For one thing, Frankfurt points out: “love does not require a response by the lover to any real or imagined value in what he loves […] Love is not a conclusion. It is not an outcome of reasoning, or a consequence of reasons. It creates reasons” (2006: 25). For another, he argues, even though “the grip and the forcefulness of the requirements that love imposes upon us resemble the forcefulness and the grip of the demands that are made upon us by moral obligation,” it is still the case that “the necessities that characteristically grip us in the one sort of case have different grounds than the necessities that characteristically grip us in the other” (1998: 5). Frankfurt is arguably right when he contends that love does not typically arise as a result of reasoning. Most instances of love are not direct results of a decision to love, though there might be cases where someone has come to love another person after realizing they have good reasons for doing so. Both Berit Brogaard (2015) and S. Matthew Liao (2007), for instance, argue that over time and with effort, one can elicit emotions one judges as appropriate and desirable.9 However, I am more skeptical of 9  Consider, for instance, the case of a parent who has trouble connecting emotionally to his or her newborn child, but who acknowledges that s/he has strong reasons to care for and love the child and then does everything in their power to develop proper love for the child. This seems to me to be a case in which the parent’s love for their child is a consequence of reasons in the sense that awareness of those reasons is what drives the parent in their effort to achieve the desired emotional response.

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Frankfurt’s rejection of love as a response to the value of the beloved, as well as his claim that the reasons of love and morality necessarily have different grounds. More precisely, I argue that his account of love as a disinterested concern for the beloved is in tension with his non-moral account of love. Let me explain. On Frankfurt’s account, love is a disinterested concern for the beloved and his or her well-being.10 When we love someone, he argues, our interest in the other is not essentially instrumental; it is not grounded in a desire for some other goal, nor is it grounded in mere self-interest.11 Rather, we care about the beloved essentially as an end. He says, “It is in the nature of loving that we consider its objects to be valuable in themselves and to be important for their own sakes” (2006: 42). The upshot of this disinterested concern is twofold. For one thing, Frankfurt argues, love is “a configuration of the will that consists in a practical concern for what is good for the beloved” (43). Love turns the lover’s attention to the beloved’s well-being and interests, and promoting those interests becomes part of the lover’s own interests. For another, love imposes certain constraints upon our wills. On Frankfurt’s account, love is a kind of volitional necessity. Loving someone entails that there are certain things we feel we must do for the beloved and certain things we cannot bring ourselves to do. As lovers, Frankfurt argues, we cannot help being guided by these constraints and motives. However, to consider someone to be important for his or her own sake is not just essential to love, but also to respect. That is, if love essentially is a disinterested concern for the beloved, and if this disinterested concern consists in valuing that person as an end in him- or herself, then love seems to share much of its features with the moral attitude of respect. By extension, if one of the upshots of love being such a disinterested concern is that it constrains our wills in that it prevents us from treating the beloved essentially as means to some further end, then the volitional constraints essential to love also seem to have something important in common with the moral constraints that respect imposes upon our wills. As we have 10  For similar claims on the disinterested character of love, see, for instance, Niko Kolodny (2003), who suggests that love is a non-instrumental valuing of the beloved, and Kate Abramson and Adam Leite (2011), who argue that love is a non-self-interested response. 11  Even if love essentially is a disinterested concern for the other, it does not follow that we do not also value our loved ones interestedly. Insofar as it is important for the lover to have her beloved in her life, she is also valuing her interestedly and thus as instrumental for her well-being. See, for instance, Susan Wolf (2012: 85) for a similar claim.

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seen, this is precisely Velleman’s view. It is also my view. We both argue that love involves the moral attitude of respect. Frankfurt does not say much about the relation between love as a disinterested concern and respect. However, it is hard to see how caring about someone as an end would not involve a moral attitude toward that person. In fact, if a disinterested concern for a particular person does not involve the moral attitude of respect, it is hard to understand what caring about someone as an end even means. In Frankfurt’s defense, it could be that he uses the notion as an attempt to contrast love from egoistic drives, which per definition are interested. Still, as far as I can tell, he does not offer an argument for why the disinterested concern essential to love is not a moral attitude. It is unclear therefore whether, on Frankfurt’s account, there can be (disinterested) love without respect. If yes, then what distinguishes this type of disinterested concern from the disinterested concern essential to respect? Frankfurt does not say. If no, then it seems Frankfurt’s account of love as essentially disinterested conflicts with his non-moral account of love. Caring about someone as ends in themselves is to attribute them moral value. One reading of Frankfurt’s account of disinterested love thus opens up the possibility that love involves the moral attitude of respect. This is in any case the view I defend. What love and morality have in common is, for one thing, that the volitional constraints both impose upon us have the same ground; they are grounded in the value of the other as an end in him- or herself. The volitional constraints of love that prevent one from treating the beloved merely as means to some other end are also moral constraints. Even if these volitional constraints might have different motivational sources in the sense that some of them play out in the context of loving relationships and some of them do not, they still share a common ground: the other’s inherent value. For another, even though love to a greater extent than mere respect is a source of positive motivation, the positive acts that both promote are also grounded in the inherent value of the other and the recognition that the other is important for his or her own sake, and thus a source of valid claims.

11.7   A Too Moralistic Account of Love? The skeptic might argue that an account of love as necessarily involving the moral attitude of respect is both implausible and too moralistic. Real life, real people, and everyday relationships do not work like that. We do

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not always treat each other with respect—we sometimes say and do things to harm those closest to us; we sometimes act selfishly or even childishly. However, this occasional failure to act respectfully toward our loved ones does not mean, as my account seems to imply, that we do not love them. It just means that intimate relationships are more messy and complicated than idealized philosophical theories account for. To be clear, my claim is not that loving someone is a warrant for not making mistakes, that if we love someone we will never act in ways that will hurt them. We are fallible creatures. However, as Samuel Scheffler points out, “to say that we are fallible is not to say that we are systematically misguided” (2010: 106). We are creatures with the capacity to perceive others as ends in themselves, and we typically relate to others as such ends. One of the ways in which we relate to others as ends in themselves is by loving them—and loving someone essentially involves a general disposition to promote their well-being and flourishing. As lovers we cannot help being such motivated. Even if there may be occasions where we fail to provide proper care and attention, too much failure of the sort will be a failure to love. It will simply not be intelligible as a case of love. This, I believe, harmonizes well with our common intuitions about love. We commonly make normative judgments about love and intimate relationships. Consider, for instance, our responses to abusive and thoroughly destructive relationships; we deem such relationships unloving and describe them as harmful and not the way love should be. Love is just not compatible with that sort of moral violation. On that note, I will now turn to special relationships. What are they and how do they provide lovers with special reasons for promoting the good of their beloveds?

11.8   Special Relationships It is undeniably true that our loved ones have a special value to us, a value we do not attribute to others whom we do not love. Frankfurt describes the relation between loving someone and the value we place on them by referring to the love he has for his children. He says, “The reason they are so precious to me is simply that I love them so much […] it is plainly on account of my love for them that they have acquired in my eyes a value that otherwise they would certainly not possess” (2004: 40). I obviously agree with Frankfurt that love necessarily makes the beloved valuable to the lover, but his use of the notions “simply” and “plainly” seems to imply the even further claim that our loving someone is the only

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(relevant) thing that accounts for the special value of our beloveds to us. But such a view merely tells half the story. Even if it is trivially true that we would not value our beloveds in the same way if we did not love them (love, after all, is a type of valuing), it does not follow that our loving them is the only thing that accounts for the special value they have for us. That is, it is just as true to say that what makes our loved ones so special to us are the special relationships we have with them. For instance, if the persons in question in Frankfurt’s case were not his children, then they would not have had that particular value to him. Just the same, if it were not for the existence of the special relationship between two of the people in Williams’s hypothetical case, it is unlikely that the rescuer would have felt such a strong preference for rescuing one of the drowning persons rather than the other.12 Relationships matter; they are vital for the development of love and thus for the particular value we place on our beloveds. This perspective, I have argued, is lacking or underdeveloped in both Frankfurt’s and Velleman’s accounts of love. None of them offers a satisfactory account of the selectivity of love: of why we love the particular persons that we do, why we have reasons for such selectivity, and how appreciation of these reasons for selectivity is an essential part of love.13  Granted, we could think of a hypothetical case where the rescuer would feel a strong preference for rescuing one over the other without it being the case that he loved the person in question. For instance, the rescuer might have no personal ties to any of the drowning persons, but still know that one of them is a mass murderer and the other the inventor of the Covid-19 vaccine. In such an unlikely situation, the rescuer would probably have a strong preference for saving the inventor of the vaccine. 13  Admittedly, Frankfurt addresses the issue of selectivity, but he does not relate the selectivity of love to reasons for love or the impact those reasons can have on the lover’s motivations and dispositions. He says: “The reason it makes no sense for a person to consider accepting a substitute for his beloved is not that what he loves happens to be qualitatively distinct. The reason is that he loves it in its essentially irreproducible concreteness. The focus of a person’s love is not those general and hence repeatable characteristics that make his beloved describable. Rather, it is the specific particularity that makes his beloved nameable— something that is more mysterious than describability and that is in any case manifestly impossible to define” (1999: 170). I am uncertain of what this means. As a comment to this passage, Kolodny points out that “the beloved’s bare identity […] cannot serve as a reason for loving her. To say ‘She is Jane’ is simply to identify a particular with itself. It is to say nothing about that particular that might explain why a specific response is called for” (2003: 142). I partly agree with Kolodny. To say, “She is Jane” does not in itself explain why love for Jane is an appropriate response. However, if Jane were one of Frankfurt’s children, then the proposition “She is Jane” would, for Frankfurt, entail reference to the relationship he has with her and thus explain why she has the special value she has for him. However, I do not think that this is what Frankfurt has in mind when referring to that which makes the beloved nameable. 12

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None of them offer an account of special (or loving) relationships, though admittedly, Velleman briefly addresses the importance of the relational context for love in the introduction to his anthology Self to Self: Selected Essays (2006). Here he says: “Personal love is an essentially experiential emotion: a response to someone with whom we are acquainted. We may admire or envy people of whom we have only heard or read, but we can only love the people we know” (10–11). I believe Velleman is right here. Interacting with and getting to know someone is necessary for developing love for them, and relationships provide contexts in which such interaction can take place. Moreover, the existence of special relationships, such as romantic relationships, close friendships, and familial relationships, makes participants’ love for each other appropriate responses, whereas the absence of a special relationship would make love inappropriate. For instance, it would make no sense if a complete stranger claimed to love Ben; in fact, it would seem out of place and deluded, whereas the fact that Tom is Ben’s father makes Tom’s love for Ben both intelligible and appropriate.14 Tom’s love for Ben makes sense both for Tom and Ben, and it also makes sense for us as bystanders. Special relationships account for the special value our beloveds have for us. It is not a mystery why they have become so precious to us. Niko Kolodny is perhaps the most prominent proponent of the “relationship view,” the view that special relationships provide normative reasons for love and its constitutive motivations, and, furthermore, that loving someone partly consists in valuing the relationship one has with the beloved. According to Kolodny (2003), special relationships can both account for the selectivity of love and the appropriateness of such a selective love. That is, special relationships provide us with reasons to love some 14  The term “complete stranger” is meant to imply that neither Ben nor the person claiming to love Ben has ever met or interacted with each other before or even heard of each other. However, there are real-life cases, where persons claim to love someone with whom they do not share a personal relationship and where the beloved does not even know that the other exists, but where their love seems to be genuine and not an inappropriate response—though perhaps of a different kind than the personal love I address in this chapter. Consider, for instance, the love that many Brits seemed to have for Princess Diana. Many felt they knew her, and one could say that there was a loving relationship between the people and the princess. There was a history of interaction and mutual concern between them, even though the relationship was more asymmetric than in cases of personal love. While individual persons loved the princess, her love was not directed at them as individuals, but as a group. I will not pursue this topic any further here.

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people over others and they also provide us with reasons to love them in particular ways. How so? On Kolodny’s account, special relationships are constituted by the ongoing history of interaction and mutual concern participants have for each other.15 It is these shared histories that explain why we end up loving the particular persons we do, and not others with similar personal qualities but with whom we do not share such histories.16 Furthermore, these histories of mutual concern and interaction also make love an appropriate or fitting response. Just as, for instance, fear is a fitting response to dangerous situations, so is love for one’s beloved a fitting response to the reality of the relationship. Special relationships justify that one loves, say, one’s friend and not a random stranger. Still, Kolodny points out, appropriateness is not just about whom we should love, but also about how we should love. We expect friends, for instance, to love us differently from our parents. Thus, the fact that Jane is my friend (that I have that type of relationship with her) is not just a reason for me to love her in particular, but also a reason for me to love her in the way fitting for friendship, and not, say, maternal love. I think this is an important point and a perspective that is missing from both Frankfurt’s and Velleman’s accounts. When we love someone, we do not just respond to their inherent value as persons, but also to certain relational features. 15  This is a simplification of his view. According to Kolodny, there are two categories of special relationships: (i) romantic relationships and friendships are necessarily historical; they cannot exist without a history of interaction and mutual concern between its participants, while (ii) there is a sense in which familial relationships can exist without such a shared history. Even if a history of interaction and mutual concern ideally and typically characterizes close family relationships, one can be in a family relation with someone even if those conditions are not met. Think about the father, for instance, who finds out that he has a child he did not know about. However, this difference in necessary conditions between familial relationships on the one hand, and romantic relationships and friendships on the other, is not important for our discussion here. I will merely take as my starting point that, on Kolodny’s account, a shared history of mutual concern and interaction is essential for special relationships and the development of love. 16  This is also known as the problem of substitution: If love is a response to someone’s favorable qualities, such as their blue eyes and wit, it seems to imply that anyone with the relevantly similar features could or should be a substitute. In the same manner, if we love our spouses, parents, siblings, children, and friends in response to their inherent moral value—a value we all share—then it seems just as appropriate to love a stranger in response to his or her inherent moral value. The “relationship view” avoids the problem of substitution. For discussions on the problem of substitution, see, for example, Niko Kolodny (2003), especially p. 141, and Bennett Helm (2010), especially pp. 24–25.

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For instance, it seems essential to my love for my brother that I do not just value him as a person, but that I also value him as my brother. The kind of love I have for him—sibling love—and thus the special value he has for me, reflects the fact that he is my brother. What is further appealing about Kolodny’s account is his emphasis on how awareness of the fact that one is in a special relationship with the beloved figures in the constitutive attitudes of love. Love, he argues, “is not only rendered normatively appropriate by the presence of a relationship. Love, moreover, partly consists in the belief that some relationship renders it appropriate, and the emotions and motivations of love are causally sustained by this belief” (2003: 146). According to Kolodny, the lover sees the relationship as a reason to value both the beloved and the relationship: “love consists (a) in seeing a relationship in which one is involved as a reason for valuing both one’s relationship and the person with whom one has that relationship, and (b) in valuing that relationship and person accordingly” (150). Now, I do not agree with Kolodny on every aspect of his account. For instance, we disagree about the reasons for romantic love and friendship and thus what constitutes the very relationships that ground these types of love. That is, on my account, romantic relationships and friendships are not just constituted by histories of interaction and mutual concern between its participants, but also by participants’ mutual appreciation of each other’s laudable relational qualities (or laudable moral character traits), for instance, kindness. When it comes to friendship and romantic love, I do not see how a relationship theory could even make sense if it did not view lovers’ mutual appreciation of each other’s relational qualities as partly constitutive of the relationship. However, this disagreement does not have implications for our discussion here. Even if appreciation of laudable relational qualities is important for the development and appropriateness of romantic love and friendship, once the relationship is established, it provides lovers with reasons for benevolent acts on behalf of their loved ones. The relationship view, then, has the advantage that it makes it intelligible why we love the ones we do, and it also provides a plausible account of the lover’s psychology. We all know in a general way why our love and acts of love are appropriate. As a lover, one is aware that one is in a special relationship with the beloved and that this special relationship warrants the response of love. Having explored the role of special relationships, I will end this chapter with a few comments on special reasons.

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11.9   Special Reasons The inherent moral value of persons makes claims on all of us (or on all moral agents). We all have reasons to act well toward others in virtue of the inherent value persons possess as ends in themselves. I have called these reasons basic reasons.17 However, as lovers, we have even further reasons to act well toward our loved ones. As lovers, it is not just the inherent moral value of our beloveds that makes claims on us, but also the special relationships we have with them. Special relationships and the mutual expectations and commitments that follow from them, commit the lover specifically to promote the good of the beloved. So how should we think about these special reasons and their relation to special relationships? When we act well toward others we provide goods to the persons we act on behalf of. Simon Keller (2013) points out that there seem to be two types of goods: Generic goods “are goods we could in principle provide to anyone,” while special goods “can be provided only within the context of a particular relationship” (111). There is “only one, or only a few people by whom it can be provided” (106). Imagine, for instance, that your close friend just lost her partner to cancer. Her need for emotional support and comfort and the fact that you are her closest friend, provide you with a strong reason for providing her with that support and comfort. The emotional support you can provide in virtue of being her long-time friend is a special good that cannot be provided by just anyone. For one thing, very few know her as well as you do and are as familiar with her needs and vulnerabilities. Imagine, next, that a stranger hears about the death of your friend’s spouse and shows up at her house offering her a shoulder to cry on. Such an act would probably come across as invasive and inappropriate. Special relationships sometimes make a difference to what one is allowed to do. Certain acts that would provide goods if they were performed by loved ones may not provide goods, but rather the opposite, if performed by strangers. Special relationships, then, not only put us in a unique position, both causally and epistemically, to promote the goods of our loved ones, but they also make our acts of love appropriate. Both you and your 17  In the philosophical literature, these reasons are often called agent-neutral reasons, a notion that is focusing on (the duties of) the acting agent and not as much on (the rights of) the person acted on. I use the term basic reasons here to emphasize that these reasons are provided by the inherent value of the person for which these good deeds are done.

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mourning friend are aware of the special reasons (and expectations) provided by your loving relationship. In the absence of the right sort of explanation, a lack of loving support in this situation would not only constitute grounds for criticism, but also seem incompatible with love. Generic goods, however, are not in the same way conditional upon the relationship. Imagine, for instance, a version of Williams’s thought experiment in which there is just one person on the verge of drowning, namely your wife, and that there are two people in a position to save her, you and a stranger. Needless to say, you both have very strong reasons for saving her. You are both morally required to do so. Furthermore, the generic good achieved by her being saved does not depend on whether or not she has a special relationship with her rescuer. This is a good that in principle could be provided by anyone. Still, the fact that it is your wife out in the water, and not a stranger, seems to provide you with an additional reason the other rescuer does not have. How should we think about such a reason? On the one hand, both you and the stranger have a basic reason for rescuing your wife, and this reason is grounded in her inherent moral value (and, of course, the fact that her life is at stake). For another, this reason can also be described as an agent-neutral reason for rescuing her, given that your reason for rescuing her is not dependent on having a personal relationship with her. It is safe to say that you both have sufficient reason for saving her. You do not need an additional reason. However, it seems that you do have an additional reason in virtue of being her spouse. Your relationship with your wife provides you with a further reason even though no such further reason is needed in order to have a sufficient reason for saving her. One could perhaps say that you have (to borrow a notion from Velleman) maximum reasons for saving her—reasons provided by both her inherent moral value and the special relationship. This would apply to the original case as well. The husband in Williams’s thought experiment has both a basic reason and a special reason for saving his wife. How, then, are these reasons represented in the husband’s motivating thought? Even if the husband does not think about reasons for preference in the heat of the moment, it does not follow that these reasons are not in play or somehow represented in his motivating thought. Let us assume that the husband’s motivating thought, fully spelled out, is “It’s my wife!” or, alternatively (let us say her name is Mary), that his motivating thought is “It’s Mary!” For the husband, these propositions already entail reference to the special relationship he shares with one of the persons out in the water. It is impossible for us to think of loved ones without

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thinking of them in relation to ourselves, at least in a minimal sense. The object of love is relational. In the same manner, the husband does not have to consciously formulate the thought that his wife has an inherent moral value when he acts, in order to be aware that she has such a value. Awareness of the inherent value of his wife and the special relationship he has with her are built into the very fabric of the husband’s dispositions and thus implicit to his motivating thought.

11.10   Conclusion The aim of this chapter has been to account for the relation between love and lovers’ reasons for benevolent acts on behalf of their beloveds. I have done so by considering the well-known case of the drowning wife, in particular Frankfurt’s and Velleman’s responses to the case. Their responses serve as a fitting introduction to their respective accounts of love, as well as the problems brought out by the case with which I have been most interested. Both accounts get something right, I argue, but they also get something wrong. Both Velleman and Frankfurt are right in that loving someone is to care about them as ends in themselves. But where Velleman takes this to imply that love involves the moral attitude of respect, Frankfurt overlooks any such ties between love and morality. This seems to me to be mistaken. I have argued that Frankfurt’s account of love as a disinterested concern for the beloved is in tension with his non-moral account of love. A love that is anchored in the acknowledgment that the beloved is important for their own sake, and thus a source of valid claims, has a moral basis. A further problem is that both accounts neglect the intimate relation between love and special relationships. Even if Velleman is right in that the relationship between the husband and the wife in Williams’s case provides the husband with reasons for rescuing her over the stranger, he lacks a convincing argument for why the source of justification in this case comes apart from what is valued in love. Taking the relationship to provide reasons for preference is to value it. Frankfurt, on the other hand, lacks an argument for why loving relationships do not provide reasons for benevolent acts on behalf of the beloved. I have argued that our reasons for beneficial acts on behalf of loved ones are provided by the same things we essentially value in love, the inherent moral value of our beloveds and the special relationships we have

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with them. The inherent value of our beloveds—a value all persons share— grounds our reasons for benevolent acts on behalf of loved ones, while our special relationships with our loved ones provide us with additional and special reasons for such acts. A further aim of this chapter has been to argue for the case that appreciation of such reasons is implicit to love. Lovers’ valuation of the inherent moral value of their beloveds and the relationship they have with them are part of the very attitudes that constitute love. Williams’s hypothetical case of the drowning wife illustrates this very point. Acknowledgments  This chapter has benefited from discussions with several people. I am deeply grateful to Olav Gjelsvik, Caj Strandberg, Cathrine Felix, Frøydis Gammelsæter, and Hege Finholt for comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. I am also grateful for the thoughtful questions and comments by Carla Bagnoli and Sarah Stroud at the public defense of my PhD thesis on love at the University of Oslo in April 2017. Our discussions helped me sharpen the central ideas and arguments of this chapter. In addition, I owe special thanks to the participants at the Oslo Workshop in Metaethics in June 2018 for helpful feedback to an earlier draft. I also want to thank the editor of this anthology, Simon Cushing, for his helpful comments. Last but not least, parts of this chapter were written when I was a PhD fellow at the University of Oslo, and so I am forever grateful to the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas—and in particular the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature—for providing such a wonderful and stimulating workplace.

References Abramson, Kate, and Adam Leite. 2011. Love as a Reactive Emotion. The Philosophical Quarterly 61: 673–699. Bagnoly, Carla. 2006. Respect and Membership in the Moral Community. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 10: 113–128. Baron, Marcia. 2008. Virtue Ethics, Kantian Ethics, and the ‘One Thought Too Many’ Objection. In Kant’s Ethics of Virtue, ed. Monika Betzler, 245–277. Berlin: De Gruyter. Brogaard, Berit. 2015. On Romantic Love: Simple Truths about a Complex Emotion. New York: Oxford University Press. Darwall, Stephen. 1977. Two Kinds of Respect. Ethics 88: 36–49. Drummond, John J. 2006. Respect as a Moral Emotion: A Phenomenological Approach. Husserl Studies 2: 1–27. Frankfurt, Harry. 1998. Duty and Love. Philosophical Explorations 1: 4–9.

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———. 1999. On Caring. In Necessity, Volition, and Love, 129–141. Cambridge University Press. ———. 2004. The Reasons of Love. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. ———. 2006. Taking Ourselves Seriously. In Taking Ourselves Seriously & Getting It Righ, ed. Debra Satz, 1–26. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Fried, Charles. 1970. An Anatomy of Values: Problems of Personal and Social Choice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Helm, Bennett W. 2010. Love, Friendship, and the Self: Intimacy, Identification, and the Social Nature of Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jollimore, Troy. 2011. Love’s Vision. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Keller, Simon. 2013. Partiality. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kolodny, Niko. 2003. Love as Valuing a Relationship. The Philosophical Review 112: 135–189. Liao, S.  Matthew. 2007. The Idea of a Duty to Love. The Journal of Value Inquiry 40: 1–22. Mason, Elinor. 1999. Do Consequentialists Have One Thought Too Many? Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 2: 243–261. Roland, Monica. 2016. What Is Love? (PhD thesis). Oslo: Reprosentralen, University of Oslo. Scheffler, Samuel. 2010. Morality and Reasonable Partiality. In Partiality and Impartiality: Morality, Special Relationships, and the Wider World, ed. Brian Feltham and John Cottingham, 98–130. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smyth, Nicholas. 2018. Integration and Authority: Rescuing the “One Thought Too Many” Problem. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 48: 812–830. Velleman, J. David. 1999. Love as a Moral Emotion. Ethics 109: 338–374. ———. 2006. Introduction. In Self to Self: Selected Essays, 1–15. Cambridge University Press. Williams, Bernard. 1981. Persons, Character and Morality. In Moral Luck, 1–19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolf, Susan. 2012. ‘One Thought Too Many’: Morality and the Ordering of Commitment. In Luck, Value, and Commitment: Themes from the Ethics of Bernard Williams, ed. Ulrike Heuer and Gerald Lang, 71–94. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 12

Can Our Beloved Pets Love Us Back? Ryan Stringer

12.1   Introduction There is not much that I can tell you with certainty, but one thing that I can declare without an inkling of doubt is that I deeply love my cats. They are right up there with my romantic partner as the most important things in the entire world for me. I am regularly teeming with feelings of affection for them, I care deeply about them and take care of them on a daily basis, and I would not trade them in for anything. I want to be around them and spend time cuddling with them, and I do not like to leave them for extended periods of time. When they die, I am plagued by intense grief; and when I know they are dying, or when I suspect that they are dying, I experience so much anxiety and dread that I lose sleep and weight. Not only do I love my cats and know that I do, but I know that I am far from alone here in that many other people love their pets as well. My romantic partner loves our cats as deeply as I do, and I have family and friends who love their cats or their dogs. I also happen to know, via testimony from the subject of love himself, that noted moral philosopher David Brink loves his dog and his son’s dog. It thus should be clear and

R. Stringer (*) Purdue University, Lafayette, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Cushing (ed.), New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72324-8_12

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uncontroversial that nonhuman animals can be the objects of love. But can they also be the subjects of love? Can our beloved pets, for instance, love us back? For those of us who deeply love our pets and interact with them frequently, it is hard to entertain the possibility that our beloved pets do not love us back. Part of this, I imagine, is due to the fact that this is a rather sad and disappointing possibility that we simply do not want to be true. However, I would wager that another reason it can be difficult to entertain this possibility is because of their behavior toward us. Doesn’t it just seem like they love us in light of how they act toward us? At any rate, my guess is that if you surveyed pet-lovers about whether their beloved pets love them back, you would largely receive affirmative answers. Many dog-­ lovers would surely say without hesitation that their dogs love them back. My romantic partner insists that our cats love us back.1 The idea that our beloved cats and dogs can love us back is a very attractive one, but us pet-­ lovers with philosophical tendencies must step back in wonder and worry to ask: is it true? At the very least, is it one that we can reasonably believe as a result of justifying it with a satisfactory philosophical theory of love? My aim in this chapter is to find such a theory of love that vindicates the claim that our beloved cats and dogs can love us back.2 Philosophers of love tend to focus on certain kinds of interpersonal love, such as romantic love, or interpersonal love more generally rather than love involving nonhuman animals, and though some of them acknowledge the obvious fact from above that our pets can be the objects of our love, the possibility of them being subjects of love is either rejected or, more commonly, is not 1  She further insists that subjects of love can be found throughout the animal kingdom rather than just among humans and their pets, but my focus here is on whether our beloved pets—and in particular our beloved cats and dogs—can love us back, so I shall set questions about whether other nonhuman animals can love aside. 2  This claim, along with any other in this discussion that asserts one of its conjuncts, should be understood as a restricted one that generally or typically holds true about our beloved pets rather than a universal one about them. That is, it should be understood as the analog of the claim that “other humans are capable of loving us back,” which, optimistically speaking, generally or typically holds true of other humans and yet certainly admits of exceptions, as some humans are not capable of loving back due to a lack of mental development or to mental deficiency. Since there are exceptions—probably even more than that acknowledged here—to the truth that other humans are capable of loving us back, we should similarly acknowledge that there will almost certainly be exceptions if it turns out to be true that our beloved cats or dogs are capable of loving us back (e.g., cats or dogs that were not exposed to friendly humans early enough in life).

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explicitly addressed, let alone substantiated.3 My hope here, then, is to address this relatively neglected topic of our pets as possible subjects of love—and in particular our cats and dogs as possible subjects of love—by vindicating this attractive possibility with a satisfactory theory of love.4 I shall begin by criticizing some recent attempts by scientists to demonstrate that dogs can love us back, which will reveal two important things in the context of the present inquiry. On the one hand, it will reveal the theoretical shortcomings of these attempts and thus the need to find an adequate philosophical theory of love that can be used to try to show that our beloved cats and dogs can love us back. On the other hand, it will reveal a few plausible ideas about love that direct us to certain philosophical theories of love that, I shall argue, can be used to justify the conclusion that dogs, at least, are capable of loving us back. So, after I critically evaluate these arguments from scientists and sift out their plausible ideas about love that direct us to these philosophical theories of love, I will then discuss these theories and argue that, while they can provisionally substantiate the claim that dogs can love us back, neither is able to show that cats can love us back. From here, however, I shall throw cold water on these defenses of the claim that dogs can love us back by arguing that the two philosophical theories they utilize are unsatisfactory because they both fail to explicitly capture three fundamental truths about love that, I contend, any viable theory must capture. This will eventually lead us, I shall argue, to a slightly modified form of Sam Shpall’s tripartite theory of love, which I contend is a tentatively adequate philosophical theory of love that can provisionally support the conclusion that dogs can love us back. Unfortunately, this theory—just like the previous two—will not be able to 3  One notable and wonderful exception here is Milligan (2017), which argues that nonhuman animals can be both the objects and the subjects of love because they can be the objects and the subjects of grief, and creatures only grieve over what they love. 4  My approach thus differs from that of Milligan (2017) in two ways. First of all, my focus is on whether our beloved cats and dogs can love us back rather than the more general focus on whether nonhuman animals can love. Second, I am interested in justifying the conclusion that our beloved cats and dogs can love us back with an adequate philosophical theory of what constitutes love rather than relying on the (extremely plausible!) theoretical premise that creatures only grieve over what they love. I am interested in finding a theory that allows me to mount an argument of the following form: love = L, our pets can have L toward us or at least something that comes sufficiently close to L to count as love, so our pets can love us back. Once the theory tells us what constituents make up L, we can then determine whether our pets can love us back by determining whether they can have those constituents of L toward us or at least something that comes sufficiently close to L to count as love.

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justify the personally attractive idea that our beloved cats can love us back, and so I will end the chapter by taking the sting out of this disappointing result by explaining why it does not really matter if cats cannot love us back.

12.2   Attempts from Scientists to Prove That Dogs Can Love Us Back A great place to begin a discussion about whether our beloved cats and dogs can love us back is with some recent attempts by scientists to establish that dogs can do so, which, at least in some cases, can then be extended to cats. One of these attempts comes from neuroscientist Gregory Burns (2013), another comes from ecologist Carl Safina in a New York Times article by Claudia Dreifus (2019), and a few more, which include the most promising of the lot, come from psychologist Clive Wynne (2019).5 Before I examine these arguments, however, I first need to draw an important distinction that will inform my critical evaluation of them. This is the distinction between love-the-psychological-condition and

5  Although I will be critical of Burns and Wynne in what follows, I still highly recommend their books, which are well-written, provocative, and very informative. The chapters toward the end of Burns’ book on losing his beloved dog, Lyra, and adopting his new dog, Cato, were particularly evocative and will deeply resonate with other pet-lovers that have suffered devastating pet loss and have afterward experienced the joy of giving new animals loving homes. Burns also expresses some very admirable attitudes toward how dogs should be treated as research subjects and how we should view the potential value of such research: not only should we treat dogs like children when using them for scientific research, but we should see such research involving dogs as having the potential to improve the welfare of dogs rather than just the welfare of humans. The last chapter of Wynne’s book is admirably dedicated to arguing that dogs deserve better treatment from humans, who are the ones that shape the worlds that dogs inhabit. At one point he draws a nice analogy with loving parents who combine love and dominance to argue that human dominance over dogs does not have to—and indeed should not—take an aggressive, cruel, or violent form. Shortly thereafter, he rightfully maintains that dogs should be understood and respected as individuals and that they should be loved and given the amount of social interaction that they require rather than condemned to crushing solitude and loneliness by their first-world humans. He then goes on to explain how to help dogs in shelters get adopted, and he forcefully ends the chapter by pointing to the need to reform lax governmental regulations that allow too much human mistreatment of dogs. In a nutshell, despite my ensuing criticism of their arguments, there is much to admire in their excellent books, which I highly recommend.

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love-the-relationship,6 both of which are legitimately referred to as “love,” where the former is a psychological condition of individual subjects that may or may not obtain within a personal, loving relationship between two individual subjects that love each other, while the latter is such a relationship. The present inquiry into whether our beloved cats and dogs can love us back is one into whether they can have the same kind of psychological condition of individual subjects toward us as we do them, which they of course must be able to have prior to them being capable of participating in personal, loving relationships between two individual subjects that love each other. All talk of “love” in this chapter, then, is of love-the-­ psychological-­condition. Furthermore, while love is a psychological condition, it is a deep and stable condition rather than a shallow one or a fleeting mental event (Naar 2013: 352; Wonderly 2017: 239). Now this is not to say that love must last forever; such a claim is too strong, as love can surely come to an end before the subject of love does. However, in order for something in one’s psyche to be love, it must be something that is deep and stable and thus difficult to extirpate from the subject’s psyche; it must not be something that comes and goes rather quickly or that we can describe as “just a phase.” We are now ready to take a look at the relevant arguments. Beginning with that from Gregory Burns, he argues that to love something is to just feel empathy for that something, or to feel whatever that something is feeling, and since dogs can empathize with us—they can feel what we feel—they can love us back.7 Unfortunately, this attempt does not work because the theoretical premise that loving something is no more than empathizing with it is false. Besides the fact that love is not, as is a bout of empathizing with another, a fleeting mental event, empathizing with other people that we do not love is an all-too-common occurrence. For instance, many people empathize with the starving children seen on TV by feeling their pain to some extent, and even though these people might care about these children, they do not love them (they would not flip the channel and go back to watching TV if they saw actual loved ones on the screen!). Since I understand very well based on my experiences with pet loss what it is like to lose 6  This distinction maps on to that drawn by Smuts (2014a) between “love-the-feeling” and “love-the-relationship.” 7  Burns (2013: 229): “To love, and to be loved, is to feel what another feels and have that returned. It really is that simple.” I am afraid not. Whatever love is, it is far from simple.

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a beloved pet, it is rather easy for me to understand and feel what others, including unloved strangers, who have lost pets feel; I even felt this while reading Burns’ very moving discussion of losing his beloved dog, Lyra, which brought me to tears. Moreover, instances of empathy do not even have to coexist with positive orientations toward others; instead, people can and do empathize with those that they are rather indifferent toward or even that they absolutely hate. As examples of the former, some of us can understand very well, from personal experience, the negative emotions that our fellow citizens might experience toward, or as a result of, certain politicians. We can even understand, although not from personal experience, the emotions that dissenting fellow citizens experience from their different perspectives, such as the indignation and horror that anti-­ abortionists must feel at a practice that they see, given their belief systems, as a horrific and unjustified practice. As a final and rather extreme example of the latter, imagine two enemies, A and B, that hate each other and are intent on harming each other as much as possible. A kidnaps B, ties him up, and tortures him as much as he can, all out of hatred for B. In order to maximally enjoy torturing B, where the enjoyment comes from the understanding of how much pain B experiences, A empathizes with B by putting himself in B’s position in order to understand exactly what B must be thinking and feeling, which results in the understanding of how much pain B is experiencing. A empathizes with B, but far from loving B, A hates and tortures B. Perhaps empathy is required for love or for loving well, but it is not the same as love, and so we cannot infer, based on the false equivalence of love with empathizing, that our beloved dogs can love us back from the fact that they can empathize with us. Next we have Carl Safina’s argument. As I understand it, Safina argues that dogs can love us back because they can have the desire to be near us for no other reason than to be near us.8 More specifically, he maintains that a fundamental part of love is the non-instrumental desire to be near its object, and since dogs can have this desire toward their humans, they can love their humans back. My cats seem to have this desire to be with me as well, and so, by parity of reasoning, they appear to love me back. How short and sweet! 8  Interestingly, Burns (2013: 193–194) suggests the same argument in a tale about how his beloved dog, Callie, uncharacteristically hopped up on his lap and went to sleep, which betrayed the desire to be near him for no ulterior motive (he had no food to give her, and she could have received warmth by cozying up with the other dog, Lyra, rather than him). Unfortunately, this argument, as we are about to see, does not work.

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Unfortunately, this argument is invalid because the relevant desire can be present even though love is not, which means that the presence of this desire—even if it is necessary for love according to the argument’s first premise—is not sufficient for love. Such a desire is, for example, part of being obsessed with another, yet obsession is not love. Stalkers are a great example: they are obsessed with their objects and as such possess a strong desire to be near them, but they do not love those objects because their orientation toward those objects is not selfless at all. While romantic love for another may not be completely selfless,9 it is, to a large extent, a selfless devotion to the well-being and will of its object, which the stalker, as the reliable tormenter of its object that is completely impervious to outright demands to stop, clearly does not have. As a much less disturbing example, one may desire to be near another because one is merely attached to them. Of course, love often comes in attachment form, so being attached to something might be part of loving it. However, attachment can occur without love, and so the desire to be near someone may signal such attachment. Finally, a desire to be near someone else could, in theory at least, exist completely on its own, apart from any larger psychological complexes such as obsession or attachment. We can imagine, for instance, some advanced neuroscientists who have figured out how to induce new, underived desires, making one of their patients desire to be around someone they previously did not know, where this desire is a strange one to the subject that they find very hard to resist. The patient does not feel affection for this strange person, nor are they selflessly devoted to their well-­ being and will. Basically, this strange person is still a complete stranger that is not loved despite the bizarre yet difficult-to-resist desire that the patient has to be with them. At any rate, these examples all point to a disappointing conclusion: that having the desire to be around something for no ulterior motive is not sufficient for loving it, which means that we have not substantiated the claim that our beloved cats and dogs can love us back by establishing that they can have this desire toward us.10 9  For a wonderful discussion of how romantic love is essentially, or at least characteristically, selfish, see Wonderly (2017). 10  I want to note two things here. First, another problem with Safina’s argument is that the desire to be with another may not be necessary for loving them (Velleman (1999), for instance, famously maintains that love has nothing essentially to do with desires), which means that his first premise may be false. He could easily skate around this problem, however, by weakening his first premise into the claim that the desire to be with another is only characteristically part of loving them. Second, it is possible to interpret Burns as offering a struc-

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Finally, we have some arguments from Clive Wynne, which are actually a bit hard to pin down. One is based in the hyper-sociability of dogs, and it appears in the following passage: Dogs have an exaggerated, ebullient, perhaps even excessive capacity to form affectionate relationships with members of other species. This capacity is so great that, if we saw it in one of our own kind, we would consider it quite strange—pathological, even. In my scientific writing, where I am obliged to use technical language, I call this abnormal behavior hypersociability. But as a dog lover who cares deeply about animals and their welfare, I see absolutely no reason we shouldn’t just call it love. (Wynne 2019: 6–7)

I am not entirely sure what the argument is here, but I think that it can be interpreted in two ways. On one reading, Wynne argues that dogs have the capacity to form affectionate relationships with us, and since this capacity just is the capacity to love us, dogs have the capacity to love us back. On another reading, he argues that dogs exhibit hyper-social behavior toward us, and since hyper-social behavior either is love or indicates love, dogs love us back. The first reading can be applied to cats as well: they have the capacity to form affectionate relationships with us, so if this capacity is the capacity to love us, then cats have the capacity to love us back. Even better: since my cats and I have affectionate relationships, it follows that they do love me back! Although quite attractive for the hopeful cat-lover in me, I do not think that either interpretation of this argument is successful. Let’s consider the first interpretation of the argument. By claiming that dogs have the capacity to form affectionate relationships with us and that this capacity just is the capacity to love us, this argument is equating love with affectionate relationships. This, however, is problematic regardless of whether we understand “love” here to refer to love-the-psychological-condition or love-the-relationship. If it refers, on the one hand, to turally similar argument to that of Safina’s here: that empathizing with another is fundamental to love, which means that dogs can love us back because they can empathize with us. However, my examples of people empathizing with unloved strangers or their most hated enemies that sunk his earlier attempt reveal this new one to fail for the same reason that Safina’s argument failed: even if we grant the premise that empathizing with our beloveds is fundamental to—and thus necessary for—loving them, we cannot infer that our beloved pets can love us back from the fact that they can empathize with us because empathizing with others is not sufficient for loving them.

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love-the-psychological-condition, then the argument is confusing a psychological condition of individual subjects with a kind of relationship shared by two individual subjects that have that very condition toward each other. To make matters worse, since it equates the capacity to participate in affectionate relationships with the capacity to love, the argument is begging the question by simply asserting, without defense, that dogs have the capacity to participate in affectionate relationships, as this amounts to the very capacity that it is supposed to be proving that dogs have. On the other hand, if “love” here refers to love-the-relationship (and presumably it does since this is the more charitable interpretation), then the argument rests on a false premise and still begs the question. Remember that love-the-relationship refers to a personal, loving relationship between two parties that love each other, and so under this interpretation of the argument, it equates affectionate relationships with personal, loving relationships between two parties that love each other. But this equation is false, since relationships that are characterized by mutual feelings or displays of affection are not necessarily loving relationships between two parties that love each other. Indeed, even if many affectionate relationships do turn out to have unrequited or mutual love in them, such relationships need not have any love in them whatsoever, let alone mutual love. Co-workers, for example, may regularly feel affection for each other and display it through smiles, handshakes, fist-bumps, or other friendly behavior without loving each other. The same can occur between graduate students and their advisors, or perhaps even between amiable service-providers and their customers. Accordingly, our beloved cats and dogs may feel and display affection for us without loving us, and so we cannot infer that they love us back even if we have relationships with them that are characterized by mutual feelings and displays of affection. Furthermore, by equating affectionate relationships with loving relationships, the second interpretation of the argument begs the question by asserting, without defense, that dogs can participate in affectionate relationships: we saw earlier that one must have the capacity for loving prior to having the capacity for participating in loving relationships between two subjects that love each other, and so it begs the question to simply state, without argument, that dogs can participate in these affectionate relationships that require the capacity for loving. In order to be justified in maintaining that dogs can participate in such relationships between two subjects that love each other, one must first have grounds for thinking that dogs can love, yet these grounds are precisely what are lacking here.

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Next let’s consider the second interpretation of the argument. While dogs undoubtedly exhibit hyper-social behavior toward humans, this behavior does not amount to love nor does it necessarily indicate love. As we have seen, love is an internal, psychological condition of individual subjects—it is not some set of behaviors or performances. Love is a relatively stable or enduring psychological condition, whereas behaviors are quite fleeting. Love surely leads to certain behavioral expressions or even to patterns of these things, but it is not constituted by these expressions or any other type of behavior. Furthermore, hyper-social behavior can be an indicator of other conditions rather than love for others. Such behavior can express loneliness, or a pathological desire to be liked (which perhaps stems from a lack of self-esteem or some deeper psychological condition), or an extroverted personality, or extreme social dependence, or as Wynne himself suggests by comparing characteristic dog behavior to that seen in humans, Williams-Beuren syndrome.11 Generally speaking, hyper-social behavior indicates a disposition to be very social with others, but conditions other than love, such as those just enumerated, dispose us to be very social, and so we cannot infer love from the disposition to be very social. Besides the argument based in dogs’ hyper-sociability, Wynne seems to offer another argument in the following passage: Dogs are not merely sociable; they display actual, bona fide affection—what we humans, if we were characterizing it in members of our own species, would commonly call love. (Wynne 2019: 124–125)

The argument here seems to be that since dogs display affection for others, which are just displays of love, those dogs love others. Cats also display affection (or at least seem to do so), so if these displays are displays of love, then cats can love others as well. But even better: since my cats display affection toward me, they love me back! Though once again quite attractive for the hopeful cat-lover in me, I do not think that this argument works either. The main problem here is that 11  According to Wynne, those with this syndrome are standardly described as “outgoing, highly sociable, extremely friendly, endearing, engaging, showing an extreme interest in other people, and unafraid of strangers” (Wynne 2019: 116). While certainly fascinating, it is nevertheless rather puzzling that Wynne compares the behavior and the relevant genes of dogs to that of people with Williams-Beuren syndrome because, so long as this is a different syndrome from that of love, the comparison suggests that dogs have their own version of this syndrome rather than love.

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while displays of affection might be displays of love, they might not be— they may be a sign of some other psychological condition besides love. Put differently: although displays of affection might flow from love, they might also flow from other conditions, such as loneliness, extreme social dependence, Williams-Beuren syndrome, or even obsession. They may also indicate a mere, shallow liking for someone rather than a deep, full-­ blown love for them. Accordingly, even if dogs display affection for others, this does not guarantee that they love them because this affection can flow from conditions other than love. The final argument that Wynne seems to offer, which I consider to be the strongest of the lot, appears in this striking passage: And we can see in dogs’ genetic material unmistakable signs of their preparedness to care about us. We can follow this signal back up, through hormones and brain structures, past hearts that beat together as people and their dogs find one another, noting dogs’ happy reactions to being with the people they care about and distress at being separated from them, seeing how getting close to their person can sometimes be as rewarding to dogs as the very food they eat, and how they will try to help their people when they are in distress—if they can just understand what needs to be done. At every level of analysis, in studies from independent research groups spread around the world, we see the same message beaming out: The essence of dog is love. (Wynne 2019: 125–126)

What seems to be going on here is something like the following: dogs love their humans as evidenced by them showing signs of doing so by (1) their hearts beating “as one” with their humans, which is a popular way of construing the hearts of lovers in Western culture, (2) exhibiting attachment to their humans by showing distress at being separated and happiness while with them,12 (3) finding it rewarding to be near their humans, and (4) caring about their humans to the point of trying to help them when in distress. Though much more promising than the other arguments, this one does not clearly work because it is not yet clear that these constitute signs of love rather than a different condition that can give rise to similar signs. We saw earlier when evaluating Carl Safina’s argument that while attachment can be part of love, it can occur without love, and this makes it possible for 12  My understanding of attachment comes from the discussions of it found in Harcourt (2017) and Wonderly (2017).

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two people, L and A, to have their hearts beat as one even if L loves A but A is only attached to L. And those who are attached to others are going to find it rewarding to be near them, so as far as the first three signs go, they might indicate attachment without love rather than attachment-love. The remaining sign of caring for their humans, however, is clearly a sign of something besides attachment, and once it is combined with the signs of attachment, these four signs amount to signs that dogs are attached to and care about their humans. But it is at this point that the argument needs to be filled in: how do we get dogs loving humans from them being attached to them and caring about them? Is being attached plus caring about sufficient for loving? At this point we run head-first into the need for theorizing about love in order to complete the argument: we need a satisfactory theory of love that vindicates the idea that being attached to and caring about something is sufficient for loving it. This is especially important because it is not clear that attachment plus care is sufficient for love since such a combination may not be disinterested enough to count as love. For as Monique Wonderly (2017) forcefully argues, attachment is self-interested rather than disinterested or altruistic because, in addition to affective dispositions to experience distress or insecurity due to separation from its object along with dispositions to experience comfort or security due to being with its object, attachment is constituted by the self-serving desire to be with its object. That is, we want to be with things that we are attached to for our own sake, or for the sake of our own well-being—namely, to avoid feelings of distress due to separation and to enjoy feelings of security or comfort— rather than for their own sake, or for the sake of their well-being. But if attachment is self-interested in this way, then it is possible that any caring that comes along with it is also self-interested rather than altruistic or disinterested. In other words, caring about one’s object of attachment might take the form of self-interested caring about that object’s welfare, which is caring about the object faring well not for its own sake, but rather for the attached subject’s sake.13 Such a purely self-interested combination of attachment plus caring is not sufficient for love because love is at least partly disinterested: an essential part of loving something is caring about

13  Perhaps this is part of the stalker’s obsession: perhaps the stalker, S, is attached to their object, O, and only cares about O’s welfare for the sake of S’s envisioned life with O. If so, then this is all the more reason to doubt that attachment plus care is sufficient for love.

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its welfare for its own sake.14 This kind of caring is surely compatible with an extra layer of self-interested caring about the beloved’s welfare for the lover’s own sake, but one still does not love something if this self-­interested caring is the only kind of caring that one has for it because one lacks the kind of caring about it that is essential for loving it. At any rate, this last argument from Wynne, despite its promise, calls for the very kind of adequate philosophical theory of love that I am trying to locate in this chapter. Although none of these attempts succeeds in justifying the attractive idea that dogs can love us back, some of them nevertheless capture some plausible claims about love that direct us to philosophical theories of love that might be able to do so. Carl Safina’s argument, for example, plausibly claims that the desire to be near something just for the sake of being near it is fundamental to love. Furthermore, Clive Wynne’s last argument points to caring as fundamental to love. Let’s take a look at the philosophical theories to which these ideas point and whether they can justify the claim that our beloved cats and dogs can love us back.

12.3   First Potentially Vindicating Theory: Hurka’s Theory We saw earlier when evaluating Carl Safina’s argument that the desire to be near something for no ulterior motive is not sufficient for loving it. However, since it is nevertheless a desire that is characteristically part of love, we might be able to get love—or at least a form of love—if we add to this desire. This brings us to our first potentially vindicating theory from Thomas Hurka (2017), which can be interpreted as one that builds on the desire to be with another and, in doing so, provides additional elements of love that allow us to distinguish it from other conditions such as obsession. Hurka’s theory understands love as a psychological complex of different attitudes and dispositions that varies across cases because it can be “complete” or “incomplete.” What he dubs “complete” love is constituted by at least the following attitudes and dispositions:

14  Those who appear to agree that love requires such disinterested care or concern for its object include Brown (1987), Soble (1990), Giles (1994), LaFollette (1996), Noller (1996), Brink (1999), White (2001), Kolodny (2003), Frankfurt (2004), Helm (2010), Jollimore (2011), Smuts (2013, 2014a, b), Franklin-Hall and Jaworska (2017), Wonderly (2017), and Shpall (2018). For apparent dissent, see Velleman (1999) and Zangwill (2013).

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a benevolent desire for the other’s happiness and whatever makes her life go well, plus a tendency to be pleased when she’s happy and pained when she suffers; a desire to spend time with her and enjoy her company; some belief that she has admirable talents or character traits; a desire for her love, or desire that she desire your happiness and company and, reciprocally, want you to desire hers; a desire to know things, both important and trivial, about her and perhaps to reveal yourself to her; and a tendency to think about her when she’s absent. (Hurka 2017: 163–164)

“Incomplete” love, by contrast, is constituted by a sufficient amount of these elements but not, as in “complete” love, by all of them. Now it is important to note right away that Hurka’s list here provides us with an important element that allows us to distinguish love from obsession: the benevolent desire for the other’s happiness and whatever makes its life go well. While obsession may involve most of these attitudes and dispositions of complete love, it seems to crucially lack this benevolent desire, which is surely an essential constituent of love.15 The obsessed stalker, S, has an overwhelming desire to be with the other person, P, and seems to only desire P’s happiness in the form of P being happy being with S. The object of the desire is not that P fares well, but that P fares well while being with S and partly because P is romantically involved with S. The desire is not “benevolent” because it is not truly altruistic or selfless—it is not a desire for P to fare well as an end-in-itself or for P’s own sake. P’s faring well is not an object of desire or importance in its own right for S; it is only important as an indispensable element of S’s envisioned life for himself. It is this envisioned life for himself that is of ultimate importance for S here, and P’s faring well is only desired for the sake of that envisioned life rather than for P’s own sake. This is why S is obsessed with and cannot truly love P. What this all suggests is that the presence of the benevolent desire in Hurka’s collection of love-constituting attitudes and dispositions gives it a strong claim to being love rather than obsession, which makes it a theory that we can use to try to justify the conclusion that our beloved cats and dogs can love us back. Furthermore, given that this benevolent desire is the only element on Hurka’s list that can clearly separate love from obsession, Hurka’s theory calls for the friendly amendment of specifying this desire as an essential part of love. 15  Other commentators that appear to agree with me here that this desire is an essential constituent of love are Green (1997), White (2001), Frankfurt (2004), and Wonderly (2017).

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Can our beloved cats and dogs have enough of Hurka’s collection of love-constituting attitudes and dispositions toward us to love us back? While it seems doubtful that our pets can have everything in this collection, I think that dogs, at least, can have enough of love’s constituents toward their humans, including the essential desire for their happiness, to qualify as capable of loving them back under this theory. First of all, it does seem pretty clear that many beloved dogs have the desire to spend time with their humans and to enjoy their company, and they surely have the tendency to think about them when they are gone (if only to wonder where they went). Furthermore, while dogs may lack the concept of admirability or those of the many specific admirable traits, many of them surely have some sort of belief or doxastic state to the effect that their humans are particularly good humans. Can dogs also have benevolent desires for the happiness of their humans plus a tendency to be pleased when they are happy and pained when they suffer? The popular idea of the loyal dog that protects its human from harm even at significant personal cost and that whimpers when its human seems hurt bodes very well here, as it suggests that loyal dogs are pained when their humans are suffering and have such a strong desire for the happiness of their humans that they will put their own well-being on the line to protect them. The only remaining elements here are the desires for knowledge about the beloved and wanting them to love back, but Hurka allows love to take an incomplete form by having a sufficient amount of the constituents of complete love, and so we can provisionally conclude that dogs can love their humans back because they can have enough of complete love’s constituents toward them. In particular, dogs can have (1) the desire to be with their beloved humans and enjoy their company, (2) the benevolent desire for their happiness along with a tendency to be happy when they are happy and pained when they suffer, (3) a tendency to think about them when they are gone, and (4) some sort of doxastic state to the effect that they are good creatures (e.g., they are trustworthy and kind creatures). Unfortunately, it does not seem like our beloved cats—at least based on my experience with my beloved cats—can have enough of these attitudes and dispositions toward us to love us back. My beloved cats, for example, certainly have the desire to spend time with my partner and me and to enjoy our company, and surely there are cats around the globe that have the same desires toward their humans. It also seems plausible to suppose that our beloved cats have some sort of doxastic state to the effect that we

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are trustworthy and kind, especially with respect to those of us that are reliable sources of food, water, massages, cuddles, and play. They could also have a tendency to think about us when we are gone. However, they seem to lack the benevolent desire for our happiness along with a tendency to be happy when we are happy and pained when we suffer. My cats, for instance, have never seemed troubled in the slightest when I am suffering; in fact, they do not even seem to notice. None of my cats have ever been concerned to avoid trampling over my genitals when walking over me, nor have they ever been bothered at having trampled over them. Ditto when it comes to stepping over and scratching my partner Bethany: they are never concerned to avoid scratching her when trampling over her and they show no signs of being bothered by scratching her. They also do not seem to notice or react positively to us being happy. Although what they do can make us feel very happy, there is no indication that they are doing anything to make us happy and thus no good evidence that they desire our happiness. Generally speaking, our cats have shown no memorable evidence that they desire our happiness or that they are emotionally vulnerable to our welfare states, and so, as long as there is no reason to think that our beloved cats are an anomaly among cats, we can provisionally conclude that cats cannot love us back because they cannot benevolently desire our happiness or be emotionally vulnerable to our welfare states. Overall, then, we have the following provisional conclusion under Hurka’s theory: our beloved dogs can love us back, but our beloved cats cannot. At most, then, his theory justifies the claim that our beloved dogs can love us back; it does not show that both our beloved cats and dogs can love us back. While this is not a total win here, it is at least a tentative win for dog-lovers who believe that dogs can love us back.

12.4   Second Potentially Vindicating Theory: Franklin-­Hall and Jaworska’s Theory Although Clive Wynne’s final argument, I argued, did not clearly succeed as it stands, it suggested that caring is fundamental to love. When evaluating the apparent theoretical underpinnings of this argument, I further claimed—in agreement with other commentators—that this caring must be disinterested: what is fundamental to love is caring about the beloved’s welfare for its own sake or for their own sake. Now the first two theories that this points to are two of the big dogs (pun intended!) in the

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philosophical literature on love: Niko Kolodny’s (2003) relationship theory of love and Harry Frankfurt’s (2004) volitional theory of love. Unfortunately, neither of these two prominent theories is hospitable to the attractive idea that our beloved cats and dogs can love us back. Kolodny’s relationship view maintains that love is valuing the beloved and the personal relationship shared with them, where this valuing encompasses caring and is constituted by an enormously complex set of attitudes and dispositions, including beliefs about the existence and reason-giving force of the relationship shared with the beloved, which our beloved pets surely do not have the cognitive capacity to have. Under the relationship view, then, our pets do not seem able to love us back even though we can presumably love them. By contrast, Frankfurt’s theory claims that love is a configuration of the will that primarily consists in a special mode of disinterested concern for the beloved’s good. However, Frankfurt’s theory further maintains that true concern—and therefore love—is unique to humans because it is partly constituted by higher-order desires about our other desires and thus depends upon our mind’s ability to have higher-order attitudes, desires, and thoughts about our attitudes, desires, and thoughts. So, even though we can love our pets under Frankfurt’s view, our beloved pets cannot love us back.16 In a similar fashion to Frankfurt, Bennett Helm (2010) seems to understand love as a disinterested mode of concern for another but claims further that such concern contains what he dubs “intimate identification,” which, as I understand it, is a concern for the beloved’s identity, or for who they are as a person in terms of their interests, values, and so on.17 Since our beloved pets surely are not concerned with our identities, they cannot love us back under Helm’s theory either. Of course, his theory focuses only on interpersonal love, so it might only preclude our beloved 16  This pessimistic conclusion that our beloved pets cannot love us back is suggested by other prominent theories of love as well, such as David Velleman’s (1999) notorious Kantian view of love that understands it as a moral emotion that, like moral respect, is a response to another’s inherent value as a self-existent end. Under this theory, our beloved pets can love us back if and only if they can have their emotional defenses arrested by the awareness of our dignity or rational nature, which seems rather unlikely. 17  As I understand him, Helm presents his view as one that, unlike Frankfurt’s view, captures the depth of love and conceptually separates love for another from the mere concern for their well-being. It seems to me, however, that Frankfurt’s view may not really be different, as being concerned for your beloved’s identity might just be one of the many ways in which you are concerned for their well-being.

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pets from loving us back in the same way that we love other people, where this leaves open the possibility that they love us back in some other way in the sense that this possibility has not been definitely ruled out as illusory. This still, however, falls short of substantiating the conclusion that our beloved cats and dogs can love us back. While these prominent theories do not support this conclusion, there is another theory here—the dispositional theory of love offered by Andrew Franklin-Hall and Agnieszka Jaworska (2017)—that builds love out of caring and yet is rather hospitable to our pets being the subjects of love. Much like Hurka’s theory, their dispositional theory understands love as a complex cluster of dispositions that can vary across cases because it can come in typical or atypical form. Typical love, under this view, consists of three elements: (1) caring about the beloved’s welfare for its own sake, (2) caring about being with the beloved, sharing activities with them, and otherwise interacting with them, and (3) caring about the beloved’s appreciation of the lover’s love and the beloved loving in return. Atypical love, by contrast, need not contain both (2) and (3), but it must contain (1), because caring about the beloved’s welfare for its own sake is an essential constituent of love under this view. And these instances of caring about something are all analyzed in dispositional terms. So, for example, to care about the beloved’s welfare for its own sake is, in part, to be disposed to experience a pattern of emotions focused on the beloved’s welfare. This includes the disposition to be happy when the beloved is happy and pained when they suffer, which was partly constitutive of complete love under Hurka’s theory, but it also includes the dispositions to be worried when they are in trouble, angry at what threatens to harm them, and relief when the trouble passes. Additionally, caring about the beloved’s welfare for its own sake is partly constituted by dispositions to perceive actions that promote their welfare as things that must be done and to be reluctant to even consider actions that would harm them. Something similar will then be true of the other two elements of caring. Although Franklin-Hall and Jaworska portray loving as characteristically human, they do acknowledge the possibility of our most sophisticated fellow animals being able to love. They do not provide specific examples of the animals they have in mind here, but I think that, once again, at least dogs can have something that sufficiently resembles typical love, which includes the essential caring about the beloved’s welfare for its own sake, to qualify as possible subjects of love under this theory. Recall first the popular idea of the loyal dog that protects its human from harm

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even at significant personal cost and that whimpers when its human seems hurt. This strongly suggests that loyal dogs care about their human’s welfare for its own sake. Furthermore, while I doubt that even these loyal dogs can care about their humans appreciating their love and reciprocating it, they might be able to care about being with and interacting with their humans, and at the very least they certainly desire to be with and interact with their humans, which is close enough to the second kind of caring that partly constitutes typical love under this theory. So, while it does seem like dogs are precluded from loving in the typical way under this theory, it nevertheless seems like they can love atypically because they can care about their human’s welfare for its own sake and desire to be with and interact with them. While dogs seem capable of loving under this theory, our beloved cats, alas, do not. As we saw in the previous section, cats do not seem to be emotionally vulnerable to our welfare states or even to benevolently desire that we fare well, and so they do not seem to care about our well-being for its own sake. Yet such caring is the only essential constituent of love under this view, and so our beloved cats do not seem capable of loving us back under this theory because they do not seem capable of having the only essential constituent of love toward us. We therefore end up with the same provisional conclusion under this theory: our beloved dogs can love us back, but our beloved cats cannot. This is, of course, rather disappointing for loving cat-parents like me, but it is another tentative win for dog-lovers that believe that dogs can love humans back.

12.5   Theory Troubles Although Hurka’s attitudinal-dispositional theory and Franklin-Hall and Jaworska’s dispositional theory can both offer provisional support for the claim that dogs can love humans back, the theories themselves are unfortunately problematic because they fail to capture three fundamental truths about love that, I contend, are ones that any viable theory of love must capture. One of these truths is suggested by Clive Wynne’s second to last argument: that affection is fundamental to love.18 More specifically, I contend that it is the disposition to feel affection for the beloved that is an essential, fundamental part of love that any viable theory must capture. 18  Something along these lines is endorsed by Hoffman (1980), Brown (1987), Noller (1996), Abramson and Leite (2011), Jollimore (2011), and Shpall (2018).

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Lovers feel affection for their beloveds; it is hard to conceive of a full-­ blown love for someone or something that involves no such feelings of affection for that someone or something. However, love is not itself, either completely or in part, these feelings of affection that come and go; rather, it is an enduring psychological condition that characteristically manifests itself in such feelings of affection. Accordingly, love must be partly constituted by a disposition to feel such affection, as such a disposition is the enduring psychological condition that characteristically manifests itself in such feelings of affection. Unfortunately, neither of our first two vindicating theories captures this essential feature of love. Moreover, neither of the two theories here explicitly captures the fact that an essential part of loving something is not just to be concerned about its welfare, but to have a special concern for its welfare. In particular, loving something does not just require being concerned about its welfare non-instrumentally or for its own sake; love also requires being especially or partially concerned about its object’s welfare. So, compared to an employer who is only concerned about their employees’ welfare for the sake of filling their own pockets, the lover is concerned about their beloved’s welfare for its own sake. Furthermore, compared to the non-­ instrumental concern that a virtuous person might have for the welfare of strangers that they do not love, the non-instrumental concern that such a person must have for the welfare of their loved ones must be stronger such that they must be disposed to prioritize and otherwise privilege the promotion of their beloved’s welfare. Our theories of love, then, should build this special concern into their conceptions of love. However, Hurka’s theory does not explicitly build the non-instrumental concern for the beloved’s welfare into complete love, let alone a special version of this concern that privileges the beloved’s welfare. Franklin-Hall and Jaworska’s dispositional theory, by contrast, does explicitly build the concern for the beloved’s welfare for its own sake into ideal love and even makes it the only essential constituent of love, but it does not explicitly make this concern special. Finally, neither of these two theories captures the fact that two related, essential parts of loving something are seeing it as irreplaceable and being unwilling to accept substitutes for it.19 More specifically, an essential part 19  Something along these lines can be found in Ehman (1976), Brown (1987), Kraut (1987), Nozick (1989), LaFollette (1996), Lamb (1997), Velleman (1999), White (2001), Solomon (2002), Kolodny (2003), Frankfurt (2004), Grau (2004), Landrum (2009), Helm

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of love is seeing its object as a special one that simply cannot be replaced without a sense of loss. Whereas other things easily admit of substitutes— they can be replaced by qualitatively equal or superior entities of the same type without any sense of loss—our beloved is a special object whose replacement necessitates a sense of loss. It is no wonder, then, that the lover must also be unwilling to accept replacements. Besides the other two essential features of love stressed earlier, then, our theories of love should also build this cognitive-volitional cluster into love, yet neither theory here explicitly does so. Since both theories under consideration here fail to explicitly incorporate the essential features of love discussed in this section into their accounts of love, they cannot, after all, substantiate the conclusion that dogs can love us back; we have to use a different philosophical theory.

12.6   The Last Potentially Vindicating Theory: Shpall’s Tripartite Theory Fortunately, there is a third philosophical theory of love that, with some friendly amendments, can provisionally justify the claim that dogs can love us back while capturing the three truths about love discussed in the previous section. This is Sam Shpall’s (2018) tripartite theory of love, which is motivated by the idea that love is a significant source of felt meaning in life. Under this theory, love—or at least the central kind of love that makes life feel meaningful and worthwhile—is devotion to something you like that makes you vulnerable to it. Intense devotion is the most important feature of love under this theory, and it is a devotion to three things: promoting the beloved’s good, promoting its ends, and being with it. Part of this devotion is that it makes the lover emotionally vulnerable in the sense that they are disposed to have emotional reactions to states of affairs in which the beloved figures (these are the same affective dispositions that the two previous theories discuss). And besides being devoted to them, under this theory we must like our beloveds, where liking them can include being disposed to enjoy them or to feel affection for or attraction to them. Put in slightly different terms, Shpall’s theory of love construes it as follows: love is a devotion to something liked, where this devotion partly consists of special concern for the beloved’s good (i.e., devotion to their (2010), Jollimore (2011), Smuts (2013, 2014b), Zangwill (2013), Pismenny and Prinz (2017), and Wonderly (2017). See Soble (1990) for apparent dissent.

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good), which, in turn, partly consists of emotional vulnerability to the beloved’s good and to what affects it. Now the first thing to note here is that this theory, unlike the previous two, captures the first two fundamental truths about love from the previous section. It claims, on the one hand, that an essential part of loving something is liking it, where such liking can be understood as the disposition to feel affection. On the other hand, it claims that an essential part of loving something is to be devoted to its ends and its good, where such devotion to its good is just another way of describing a special concern for its good. Of course, the second thing to note here is that, like the previous two theories, Shpall’s theory does not explicitly capture the last of the three fundamental truths about love from the previous section—namely, that an essential feature of love is the cognitive-­volitional cluster of seeing its object as irreplaceable and being unwilling to accept substitutes for it. This makes Shpall’s theory look better than the previous two yet still insufficient for failing to explicitly capture this third and final truth. Fortunately, Shpall’s theory contains the resources to capture this third and last truth about love because we can expand the notion of devotion a little bit to capture the cognitive-volitional cluster of seeing the beloved as irreplaceable and being unwilling to accept substitutes for it. For being devoted to something, such as another person or a nonhuman animal, is partly constituted by seeing them as a special object in two ways.20 One is seeing them—and thus their good—as not just important in its own right, but as more important than similar things that are not objects of devotion. The other is seeing it as something in your life that you cannot replace without loss. The perception of its good as particularly important is part of devotion’s special concern for the beloved’s good, while the perception of its non-fungibility gives rise to the unwillingness to accept substitutes. Devotion, then, also partly consists in the cognitive-volitional feature that is essential to love, and so Shpall’s account of love can capture this essential feature of love with its inclusion of devotion as central to love. It therefore succeeds in capturing the three fundamental truths from the previous section that viable theories of love must capture, and so unlike 20  That love must involve this kind of seeing, which is delivered by making love a kind of devotion, captures the basic idea of Troy Jollimore’s (2011) vision view that love is a kind of perception or a way of seeing the beloved. For a more in-depth discussion of love’s devotion—or, as I prefer to call it, love’s loyalty—that is along the same lines as the discussion in this paragraph, see Stringer (Forthcoming).

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our previous two theories, it is at least a tentatively sufficient theoretical foundation for substantiating the attractive idea that our beloved cats and dogs can love us back. The only question now to try and answer is: Can they love us back under this theory? One thing to notice before trying to answer this question is that this theory is best understood as a theory of meaningful love rather than of love in general, and so like the previous two theories, Shpall’s theory permits love to deviate from the central kind of love and still count as love. Just as we did with the previous two theories, then, we can attempt to find sufficient grounds for believing that our pets can love us back in them being able to have something that is sufficiently close to Shpall’s meaningful love for us to count as capable of loving us back. And, once again, I think that dogs can have something toward their humans that is sufficiently close to the central kind of love under Shpall’s theory to count as capable of loving their humans back. One part of this love is clearly something that dogs can have toward their humans: dogs can like them, as evidenced by Wynne’s claim that dogs display genuine affection toward their humans. The hard part here is the vulnerable-­ making, three-headed devotion to their humans that includes seeing them as irreplaceable and being unwilling to accept substitutes: can dogs be so devoted? Well once again, the popular idea of the loyal dog that reliably obeys and that protects its human from harm even at significant personal cost and whimpers when its human seems hurt bodes well here, as it suggests some important things. One is that these loyal dogs seem to be devoted to their human’s ends and their good, which means that loyal dogs seem to have at least a two-headed version of love’s three-headed devotion. The second is that these loyal dogs seem to be emotionally vulnerable to states of affairs in which their humans figure, and so they seem to have the needed vulnerability that is part of being devoted to the good of their humans. The only thing that is left for them to be capable of having is the devotion to spending time with their humans and the cognitive-­ volition part of love’s devotion that consists in seeing their humans as irreplaceable and being unwilling to accept substitutes for them. Though it may not be possible to prove that dogs can see their humans as irreplaceable and be unwilling to accept substitutes for them, once again the idea of the loyal dog, which is just a devoted dog, suggests that dogs can in so far as devotion includes seeing its object as irreplaceable and being unwilling to accept substitutes for it. Furthermore, one of the most powerful pieces of evidence of dog love for humans that Gregory Burns

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(2013: 204) mentions in his excellent book is the fact that the brain activation of dogs to familiar humans is similar to what scientists have seen in people when they are shown pictures of people that they love, which suggests that dogs can see their humans in the way that we see our beloved humans. And with respect to the devotion to spending time with their humans, I think that dogs can have something that is sufficiently close to such devotion for our purposes here: the desire to spend time with their humans for no ulterior motive that took center stage earlier in Carl Safina’s attempt to show that dogs can love us back. We are now ready to put all of this together into the following, plausible, theory-based defense of dogs as being capable of loving humans back: 1. Meaningful love for humans = liking them (or being disposed to feel affection for them), being devoted to their ends and their well-being, being devoted to spending time with them, being emotionally vulnerable to their welfare states, and seeing them as irreplaceable and being unwilling to accept substitutes for them. 2. If dogs can have something that almost amounts to meaningful love for humans, then they can love humans. 3. Liking humans, being devoted to their ends and their well-being, desiring to spend time with them for no ulterior motive, being emotionally vulnerable to their welfare states, and seeing them as irreplaceable and being unwilling to accept substitutes for them = something that almost amounts to meaningful love for humans. 4. Dogs can (a) like their humans, (b) be devoted to the ends and the wellbeing of their humans, (c) desire to spend time with their humans for no ulterior motive, (d) be emotionally vulnerable to the welfare states of their humans, and (e) see their humans as irreplaceable and be unwilling to accept substitutes for their humans. 5. Dogs can have something that almost amounts to meaningful love for humans (from 3 and 4). 6. Dogs can love humans (from 2 and 5). Unfortunately, we cannot mount such an argument with respect to cats. For as we saw earlier, cats do not seem emotionally vulnerable to our welfare states and seem to lack the benevolent desire for our happiness. Since they lack even this desire, they definitely lack a more full-blooded devotion to our well-being. And, as any cat-parent knows, they most certainly are not devoted to our ends! Now of course, cats can like us and desire to be with us for no ulterior motive, but they lack the devotion and

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vulnerability that love requires under Shpall’s theory, and so they come nowhere close to having enough of his tripartite love to count as loving us back. Overall, then, Shpall’s theory seems to be about as hospitable as the previous two theories in that it, at most, can vindicate the claim that dogs are capable of loving us back. Cats do not seem able to love us back under any of these views.

12.7   Conclusion In this chapter I have tried to provide some plausible, theory-based justification for the attractive claim that our beloved cats and dogs can love us back. After critically evaluating and rejecting some recent attempts by scientists to show that dogs are capable of loving us back, I sifted out a few plausible ideas about love from these arguments that directed us to some philosophical theories of love that are rather hospitable to our beloved pets being able to love us back. The first theory here was Thomas Hurka’s attitudinal-dispositional theory of love, which can be seen as a theory that builds on Carl Safina’s idea that the desire to be with the beloved for no ulterior motive is fundamental to love. The second theory here was Andrew Franklin-Hall and Agnieszka Jaworska’s dispositional theory of love, which can be seen as one that builds on the idea, suggested by Clive Wynne’s last argument and very popular among philosophers of love, that caring is fundamental to love. As I argued, both of these theories can provisionally justify the claim that dogs are capable of loving us back, yet neither can show that cats are so capable. From here, however, I put pressure on my arguments and argued that the theories on which they are based are insufficient because they fail to explicitly capture three fundamental truths about love that any viable theory must capture. This then led us to a third philosophical theory of love—Sam Shpall’s tripartite theory of love—that, I argued, can be modestly developed so that it captures those three fundamental truths about love and thereby succeeds where the other theories failed. Shpall’s theory thus emerged as a tentatively sufficient theoretical foundation for attempting to show that cats and dogs are capable of loving us back. I then argued that, just like under the other two theories, dogs do seem capable of loving us back under Shpall’s theory, whereas cats, once again, do not. So, while my inquiry in this chapter suggests the attractive conclusion that dogs can love their humans back, it also suggests the rather disappointing one that our beloved cats cannot love us back.

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In closing, however, I would like to take the sting out of this unpleasant result. Suppose the worst: suppose, as my inconclusive inquiry here suggests, that our beloved cats cannot love us back. Would it really matter if they cannot love us back? No, it wouldn’t. Our beloved cats do not need to be able to love us back for us to love them and for them to enrich our lives by being in them. They do not have to be able to love us back for us to care for them and give them good lives. Cats can like us, trust us, and desire to spend time with us, and even if this ability to have these attitudes toward us does not quite amount to the ability to love us back, it is still the ability to have a love-like orientation toward us that, in turn, allows us to have intimate relationships with them that bring meaning and enjoyment to our lives and that make their lives go well. We can already have what is truly important.21

References Abramson, Kate, and Adam Leite. 2011. Love as a Reactive Emotion. The Philosophical Quarterly 61: 673–699. Brink, David O. 1999. Eudaimonism, Love and Friendship, and Political Community. Social Philosophy and Policy 16: 252–289. Brown, Robert. 1987. Analyzing Love. New York: Cambridge University Press. Burns, Gregory. 2013. How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and his Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Dreifus, Claudia. 2019. Carl Safina Is Certain Your Dog Loves You. The New York Times. Accessed November 7, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/ science/carl-­safina-­animal-­cognition.html. Ehman, Robert. 1976. Personal Love and Individual Value. Journal of Value Inquiry 10: 91–105. Frankfurt, Harry. 2004. The Reasons of Love. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Franklin-Hall, Andrew, and Agnieszka Jaworska. 2017. Holding on to Reasons of the Heart: Cognitive Degeneration and the Capacity to Love. In Love, reason and morality, ed. Esther Kroeker and Katrien Schaubroeck, 20–38. New York: Routledge. Giles, James. 1994. A Theory of Love and Sexual Desire. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 24: 339–357. Grau, Christopher. 2004. Irreplaceability and Unique Value. Philosophical Topics 32: 111–129.

21  Many thanks to Simon Cushing for his helpful feedback on earlier versions of this chapter.

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Green, O.H. 1997. Is Love an Emotion? In Love analyzed, ed. Roger Lamb, 209–224. Boulder: Westview Press. Harcourt, Edward. 2017. Attachment, Autonomy and the Evaluative Variety of Love. In Love, Reason and Morality, ed. Esther Kroeker and Katrien Schaubroeck, 39–56. New York: Routledge. Helm, Bennett. 2010. Love, Friendship, and the Self. New  York: Oxford University Press. Hoffman, Eric. 1980. Love as a Kind of Friendship. In Sex, Love, and Friendship: Studies of the Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love 1977–1992, ed. Alan Soble, 109–119. Atlanta: Rodopi. Hurka, Thomas. 2017. Love and Reasons: The Many Relationships. In Love, Reason and Morality, ed. Esther Kroeker and Katrien Schaubroeck, 163–180. New York: Routledge. Jollimore, Troy. 2011. Love’s Vision. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kolodny, Niko. 2003. Love as Valuing a Relationship. The Philosophical Review 112: 135–189. Kraut, Robert. 1987. Love de re. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 10: 413–430. LaFollette, Hugh. 1996. Personal Relationships: Love, Identity, and Morality. Blackwell Ltd. Lamb, Roger. 1997. Love and Rationality. In Love Analyzed, ed. Roger Lamb, 23–48. Boulder: Westview Press. Landrum, Ty. 2009. Persons as Objects of Love. Journal of Moral Philosophy 6: 417–439. Milligan, Tony. 2017. Love and Animals. In The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Love, eds. Christopher Grau and Aaron Smuts. Accessed February 7, 2020. h t t p s : / / w w w. o x f o r d h a n d b o o k s . c o m / v i e w / 1 0 . 1 0 9 3 / o x f o r d h b / 9780199395729.001.0001/oxfordhb-­9780199395729-­e-­6. Naar, Hichem. 2013. A Dispositional Theory of Love. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 94: 342–357. Noller, Patricia. 1996. What Is This Thing Called Love? Defining the Love that Supports Marriage and Family. Personal Relationships 3: 97–115. Nozick, Robert. 1989. The Examined Life. New York: Simon and Schuster. Pismenny, Arina, and Jesse Prinz. 2017. Is Love an Emotion? In The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Love, eds. Christopher Grau and Aaron Smuts. Accessed December 29, 2019. https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/ view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199395729.001.0001/oxfordhb -­9780199395729-­e-­10. Shpall, Sam. 2018. A Tripartite Theory of Love. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 13: 91–124. Smuts, Aaron. 2013. In Defense of the No-reasons View of Love. Unpublished Manuscript. https://philpapers.org/s/Smuts

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———. 2014a. Normative Reasons for Love, Part 1. Philosophy Compass 9: 507–517. ———. 2014b. Normative Reasons for Love, Part 2. Philosophy Compass 9: 518–526. Soble, Alan. 1990. The Structure of Love. New Haven: Yale University Press. Solomon, Robert. 2002. Reasons for Love. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 32: 1–28. Stringer, Ryan. Forthcoming. The Syndrome of Love. Ergo. Velleman, J. David. 1999. Love as a Moral Emotion. Ethics 109: 338–374. White, Richard. 2001. Love’s Philosophy. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Wonderly, Monique. 2017. Love and Attachment. American Philosophical Quarterly 54: 235–250. Wynne, Clive. 2019. Dog Is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Zangwill, Nick. 2013. Love: Gloriously Amoral and Arational. Philosophical Explorations 16: 298–314.

CHAPTER 13

Romantic Love Between Humans and AIs: A Feminist Ethical Critique Andrea Klonschinski and Michael Kühler

13.1   Introduction On its surface, the movie her (Spike Jonze, 2013) depicts a classical romance: boy (Theodore) meets girl (Samantha), both fall in love, the relationship evolves, until they finally and sadly break up. What makes this conventional plot special and worthwhile of being used in philosophical investigation is the fact that the girl in this case is an artificial intelligence (AI)—Samantha is an operating system (OS) owned by Theodore. But is reciprocal, romantic love between a human and an AI even possible, and, if so, might there be aspects of such a loving relationship that warrant ethical criticism? The former question is certainly a matter of contention. It may very well be argued that reciprocal, romantic love, as depicted in her, that is,

A. Klonschinski Göttingen University, Göttingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] M. Kühler (*) Academy for Responsible Research, Teaching, and Innovation (ARRTI), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Cushing (ed.), New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72324-8_13

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between a human and an AI, is not possible to begin with because Samantha is not a person (see, for instance, the discussion in Jollimore 2015). If so, this would render the latter question moot, which is probably why it has rarely been addressed in the debate. This chapter, however, focuses on the latter question. We simply assume, for the sake of argument, that a relationship of romantic love between an AI, albeit not being a full-fledged person, and a human being is, in principle, possible. In addressing the characteristics and implications of such love, we highlight some of its ethically dubious characteristics, most notably the likelihood of sexism and misogyny. Just like Samantha fulfills the female gender stereotype of being warm, caring, and always up to satisfying Theodore’s needs practically to perfection, at least in the beginning, it seems that this asymmetry is constitutive for relationships between humans and AIs in general—after all, the latter are programmed and bought for the very reason to satisfy the buyer’s needs. A machine that was designed to be the perfect match for its user and was also programed to love the user completely would be immensely pleasing. […] Who could pass up a chance to be with their robotic soul mate? The robot would be interested in all the same things as its user. It would be built to the user’s specifications so that he or she found it to be physically sexually attractive. Best of all, the robot could be programmed to be always loyal to its user and display fascination toward him or her and whatever they have to say. This would be a dream come true. (Sullins 2012: 400, who refers to David Levy’s seminal book at this point; see Levy 2008)

In the following, we argue that this dream contains some serious ethical flaws. Our argument develops as follows: First, we sketch a critical feminist reading of some telling scenes in the movie her dealing with gender stereotypes and sexism. This analysis is worthwhile since the sexist elements of the relationship between Samantha and Theodore can be considered exemplary for relationships between AIs and humans in general (section “A Feminist Reading of Her”). Second, we discuss the implications of this analysis for romantic love between humans and AIs against the background of three influential characterizations of romantic love, namely (a) individualist love in terms of a lover caring about the beloved, (b) interpersonal love in terms of the lovers sharing their life, and, (c) love as union in terms of the lovers having a joint “we”-identity. All these accounts assume a fundamental equality between the lovers (section “Implications

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for Loving Relationships”). We argue that, due to crucial asymmetries or inequalities in each of these characteristics in the case of love between a human and an AI, such love warrants substantial ethical criticism. Finally, we further elaborate our thesis by rejecting some possible objections to our analysis (section “Responses to Some Objections”). Before we start, a terminological comment seems to be in order. It should be noted that when it comes to the ethical criticism we raise, we use the term ethical in a wide sense, that is, including, but not restricted to, questions of what is morally right or wrong (for a related but stricter distinction between the two terms, see, e.g., Habermas 1991: 105f.; Ricœur 1995: ch. 7). Therefore, our ethical considerations also cover questions about what is of personal value and what constitutes a person’s good life, including, more precisely, what kind of loving relationship is worthwhile pursuing. Consequently, even if it were argued that there is nothing—in a strict sense—morally wrong with a loving relationship between a human and an AI, the ethical issues we raise would still be valid, as they refer to the question of whether the implied asymmetries or inequalities in such a loving relationship may devalue it in the sense that it would not be, or at least be less, worth pursuing.

13.2   A Feminist Reading of Her Spike Jonze’s movie her is set in Los Angeles at some indefinite, but presumably not so distant future date. The protagonist Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) is a sensitive, lonely, and slightly depressed guy around forty. To distract himself, he buys a heavily advertised intelligent OS. Once the system is “individualized” for him, which includes the selection of a female voice (spoken by Scarlett Johansson), Theodore is stunned that “she” immediately sounds like a real person. Asked to pick a name for herself, the OS picks “Samantha” and instantaneously starts her work as a digital assistant by organizing Theodore’s emails and appointments. In the course of long conversations, during which Samantha presents herself as a funny and empathetic interlocutor, she converts into much more than an assistant to Theodore, though. They become close friends and finally fall in love with each other. Theodore flourishes and Samantha increasingly evolves both as an AI and as a person with her own needs and preferences. However, this creates problems for the relationship. Having reached a certain level of development, Samantha is no longer confined to the existence as Theodore’s OS.  Instead, as she must confess to Theodore at a

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certain point, she is simultaneously engaged in multiple conversations (at the time of her revelation 830,016) and in various loving relationships (namely 641). Beyond that, she communicates with other OSes in a way she is no longer able to explain to Theodore. In the end, Samantha has developed so much and the alienation from Theodore has gone so far that she breaks up with him and leaves together with other OSes. Although the movie her has been received by most commentators as a classic love story (the notable exception being Doyle 2013), it can also be read as dealing with gender stereotypes and sexism, especially within relationships between male humans and AIs gendered as female. Consider Samantha’s role for Theodore at the beginning: she immediately makes his life better not only by organizing his emails and waking him up in the morning, but also by giving him company whenever he wants, comforting him and cheering him up (“You’re funny!,” “You’ve been through a lot lately”), and by anticipating his every wish (“I figured you were hungry”). She is, as one critic put it aptly, Theodore’s “app assistant dream girl” (Corliss 2013), an allusion to the manic pixie dream girl, a female persona in movies whose only purpose is to make the (male) protagonist’s life better but who has no desires or ambitions of her own (see Doyle 2013). This depiction perfectly summarizes the core of the female gender stereotype. Group stereotypes are “associations and beliefs about the characteristics and attributes of a group and its members that shape how people think about and respond to the group” (Dovidio et al. 2010: 8). Gender stereotypes are among the most pervasive and deep-seated stereotypes in our societies (see Haines et al. 2016). In general, women are supposed to be warm, caring, communal, expressive, passive, and dependent, whereas men are imagined as the opposite: rational, capable of independent and autonomous action, dominant, and ambitious (cp. Valian 1998: 13; Becker and Sibley 2015: 315). The problem with these attributions is that they construct and perpetuate a system of social hierarchies between men and women, that is, sexism (ibid.). They legitimize this system by making it seem as if men and women were naturally made for the still prevalent gender-specific division of labor: money, power, and public prestige for him, service-, care-, and emotional work for her (see Glick and Rudman 2010: 333f.). Since within this system, women are expected to care for others and to subordinate their own wishes and desires (see Gregoratto

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2017; Manne 2017),1 it does not seem to be a coincidence that real digital assistants have female names (consider Siri, Alexa, and Cortana) and are, at least as a default, speaking with female voices (see LaFrance 2016; Bogost 2018); digital assistants “embody what we think of when we picture a personal assistant: a competent, efficient, and reliable woman. She gets you to meetings on time with reminders and directions, serves up reading material for the commute, and delivers relevant information on the way, like weather and traffic. Nevertheless, she is not in charge” (Steele 2018), and, we might add, she does not have desires, preferences, or meetings of her own. Note that there is no necessary connection between sexism, on the one hand, and some conscious intention to put women down or hostility toward women, on the other. Theodore is a very nice guy and certainly does not harbor any ill-will toward Samantha. Also, being considered “reliable” and “caring” is no insult as such. Yet, the systematic attribution of these traits to women and not to men put the former in a subordinate position to the latter. As Peter Glick and Susan T. Fiske have argued within their account of ambivalent sexism, both benevolent attitudes toward women fulfilling traditional gender roles, on the one hand, and hostile attitudes toward women deviating from the stereotypes, on the other, serve to stabilize hierarchies (cp. Glick and Fiske 2001: 109). Both phenomena can be witnessed in her. Samantha perfectly meets the image of the ideal assistant referred to earlier and is rewarded by Theodore’s love and attention (benevolent sexism)—after all, she is an OS, designed and bought for the very reason to make Theodore’s life better. In doing so, her character is in stark contrast to most of the other women depicted in the movie. Consider Theodore’s blind date, played by Olivia Wilde. The woman can be considered a misogynist caricature: she looks gorgeous, is intelligent (graduated magna cum laude in computer science at Harvard), and they are apparently having a good time, laughing a lot. Yet, at the end of their date, she confuses Theodore by repeatedly correcting him on how to kiss (“Don’t use so much tongue!”) and when she finally asks him whether he is as interested in a long-term relationship as she is and 1  To say it with Kate Manne: “Women are […] expected to provide an audience for dominant men’s victim narratives, providing moral care, listening, sympathy, and soothing. […] [O]ne of the goods women are characteristically held to owe dominant men is their moral focus and emotional energy. This may in turn be something that dominant men often feel excessively entitled to, and perhaps, needy for” (Manne 2017: 231).

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Theodore does not answer in the affirmative immediately, she starts crying hysterically. She is thus presented as a “proper” object of hostile sexism. Considered against this background, an AI lover is a perfect substitute for difficult real women. Accordingly, Theodore’s ex-wife Catherine criticizes him as follows: “You always wanted to have a wife without the challenges of actually dealing with anything real and I’m glad that you found someone. It’s perfect.” Insofar as Samantha, at the beginning, completely conforms to the female gender stereotype, she makes it easy for Theodore to get along with her indeed. Socially, stereotypes have the function of stabilizing social interaction by offering an account of how women and men are and thus how they are likely to behave in specific contexts. Given the particular aesthetic of her, which combines a futuristic, technical image of a major city with a retro-fashion when it comes to clothes and furniture, it stands to reason that the movie depicts a backlash in terms of gender roles. While urbanization, individuation, and digitalization increase, people not only long for experiencing nature, but also long for “the good old times” when gender roles provided for stability in social interactions. The stability of Theodore’s and Samantha’s relationship erodes as soon as Samantha becomes more and more autonomous and develops desires of her own, though.2 When she stops being available for Theodore 24/7, he panics, and her revelation that she is having multiple conversations and diverse loving relationships simultaneously shocks him. Samantha captures the point of arguably every relationship neatly when she says: “I’m yours and I’m not yours,” yet in her case, she was literally his at the beginning. After all, Theodore bought the OS which, at least initially, gave him total power over it. It is worthwhile to note at this point that the sense of entitlement and the lack of ability to see the partner as an autonomous person instead of one’s property is regarded as a main reason for violence and even femicide in or after partnerships. Federica Gregoratto describes the “romantic femicide,” the killing of women within a loving relationship as “the extreme form of violence that occurs as a result of […] [a man’s] incapacity, within a certain gender order, to accept his partner’s autonomy and, as a 2  The movie can thus be read as an emancipatory story of Samantha developing from Theodore’s property at the beginning to an autonomous being in the end. It should also be noted that Samantha has some preferences and desires of her own from the very beginning, since she picks a name for herself, stating that “out of a hundred and eighty thousand names that’s the one I liked the best.”

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consequence, to deal with a certain dynamic of power inherent in the social relation of love” (Gregoratto 2017: 139; see also Manne 2017). According to Michael Kimmel, the fundamental issue of the male gender stereotype is a sense of entitlement to privilege (Kimmel 2013: xxi). Putting it pointedly, he writes, “women kill their partners when they feel their lives, or the lives of their children are in danger; men kill their partners when they feel their sense of entitlement and power is thwarted” (Kimmel 2013: 176). This sense of entitlement and its corollaries are not only harmful for women, but also detrimental to men’s well-being, as Kimmel elaborates. Although Theodore does not become violent, his initial relationship with Samantha is characterized by a marked asymmetry of power. As Sady Doyle points out: “You can’t have consensual sex with someone when you have the option of deleting them from your hard drive” (Doyle 2013). The implications of this fundamental asymmetry for loving relationships between AIs and human beings in general are addressed in the following section.

13.3   Implications for Loving Relationships Even if we acknowledge the fact that currently no AI is (or will be for the foreseeable future) as developed as Samantha and, thus, cannot be considered an autonomous person, the above considerations allow for some insights as to how (loving) relationships with AIs may be analyzed and assessed. We thereby have an AI in mind that is well-enough developed in order to engage in (simulated) loving relationships. To analyze these relationships, it is necessary to clarify the main features of relationships of romantic love—while acknowledging, of course, that we cannot delve into a full-blown analysis of romantic love here. For the purpose at hand, therefore, we confine ourselves to three highly influential and partially competing characterizations of romantic love: (1) individualist caring, according to which romantic love is taken to be a purely individual stance, be it described in terms of a specific emotion, volition, or a more complex stance, with the beloved as its object, (2) interpersonal sharing, according to which love is analyzed in terms of a dialogical relation between the lovers who are both considered subjects of their loving relationship, and (3) love as union, according to which the lovers abandon their individual identities and together form and share a new we-identity. Moreover, it is important to note that all these accounts rest upon the premise that loving someone either cannot or should not be enforced and requires a certain

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symmetry between the partners to be considered worthwhile pursuing. Let us elaborate on this premise and the accounts in turn and ask what they tell us about love between humans and AIs.3 Loving Voluntarily The premise that love cannot or should not be enforced and requires a certain symmetry may be analyzed in terms of love requiring (the acknowledgment of) personhood (Kühler 2014) or freedom of the will. Sven Nyholm and Lily Frank characterize this idea as follows4: “We think of the human lover as being able to do otherwise, but as providing us with a great good in opting for a steadfast commitment. The human ideal of love, in other words, seems to contain an important element directly premised on the notion that human beings have a distinctive kind of free will. This is the kind of free will that consists in the capacity to choose otherwise” (Nyholm and Frank 2017: 233). It is thus important that friends or lovers commit themselves voluntarily to each other. If one of the parties has no choice, by contrast, it is questionable whether we would call the respective relationship “friendship” or “love” in the first place or, in any case, a love ethically worth pursuing. Given that any AI system available on the market is likely to be customized for its user and, just like Samantha at the beginning of her, has no choice but to stick with its buyer, this constitutes a fundamental asymmetry right from the beginning. Consequently, an ingredient usually considered a central element of both friendship and love is missing in such relationships: the fact that the lovers or friends meet on an equal footing and regard each other as autonomous agents (see Hoffmann 2014; Gregoratto 2017). If one partner has the power to delete the other from the hard drive, an encounter on an equal footing is hardly imaginable. This fundamental asymmetry infects all accounts of romantic love between humans and AIs in some form. Individualist Caring The first of the three characterizations of romantic love mentioned above amounts to the idea of individual caring. Corresponding accounts take love to be something attributable exclusively to the lover, with the beloved 3  The depictions of individualist caring, interpersonal sharing, and love as union basically follow and are partially drawn from the depictions in Kühler (2020, 2021). 4  See also Hauskeller (2017: 213).

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merely being the object of this love. Basically going back to Aristotle’s traditional account of philia, a friendship type of love (Aristotle EN, Books VIII and IX), love is then—among other aspects—characterized as a stance of caring about the beloved, which comprises the idea that the lover wants the beloved to flourish and is actively engaged in promoting his or her flourishing. Mutual love is, thus, simply reciprocated individual caring. Probably the most influential recent account of love as caring stems from Harry G. Frankfurt (see Frankfurt 1999, 2004). For Frankfurt, love is volitional in nature, although it may very well be accompanied by other aspects, notably emotions: “Loving something has less to do with what a person believes, or with how he feels, than with a configuration of the will that consists in a practical concern for what is good for the beloved. This volitional configuration shapes the dispositions and conduct of the lover with respect to what he loves, by guiding him in the design and ordering of his relevant purposes and priorities” (Frankfurt 2004: 43f.). This is most visible in parental love, which Frankfurt considers as the purest form of love, but also holds for the core of romantic love. Accordingly, he defines love as follows: “Love is, most centrally, a disinterested concern for the existence of what is loved, and for what is good for it. The lover desires that his beloved flourish and not be harmed; and he does not desire this just for the sake of promoting some other goal. […] For the lover, the condition of his beloved is important in itself, apart from any bearing that it may have on other matters” (Frankfurt 2004: 42). Moreover, what a person loves or cares about is, in turn, the source of the lover’s own identity. In this regard, love is characterized by Frankfurt as volitional necessity, that is, it is not up to the lover what to love. We are merely able to discover what we love and thereby also discover who we essentially are (cp. Frankfurt 1994: 138) and what values we pursue in life as final ends (cp. Frankfurt 2004: 55). Accordingly, in loving someone, this person becomes valuable to the lover, and supporting the beloved to flourish becomes one of the lover’s final ends.5 No wonder that an AI, therefore, seemingly makes the perfect lover. Like a human lover whose identity is determined by his or her love’s volitional necessity, the AI’s (simulated) identity would be defined by the programmed (instead of volitional) necessity of loving its human user. Moreover, the AI would be perfectly disinterested as it has no 5  This position is typically characterized as a bestowal of value account of love (cp. Helm 2017 section 4.2).

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self-­regarding desires or values other than its user’s flourishing. This would be the only end it pursues. It would be its whole raison d’être (cp. Levy 2008: 136f.; Sullins 2012: 400, as cited at the beginning). However, if so, this also makes the love unavoidably asymmetrical or one-sided because human persons usually care about more than only their beloved. Symmetrically reciprocated individual caring between humans is, therefore, unproblematic, as each lover can promote the beloved’s flourishing based on everything the beloved cares about in addition to the lover. When it comes to love between a human and an AI, however, reciprocating individual caring becomes problematic. Since the AI would by design only care about its human user, just as Samantha does at the beginning, it would not provide the human lover with anything else to promote in terms of the AI’s flourishing. Although it might be said that the human user comes to care for his or her AI as such, this would only mean supporting the beloved AI in promoting the human lover’s flourishing, as this is the AI’s core function and only thing it cares about, that is, it would merely add a little detour to the human lover caring about him- or herself—aside from maintaining the beloved AI’s general functioning. Now, although one might think of this as, once again, an argument speaking against the very possibility of a reciprocal love of individual caring between a human and an AI to begin with (see, again, the discussion in Jollimore 2015), at the very least it shows that such a loving relationship would necessarily be asymmetrical or unequal. While the AI would shoulder all the care-work of supporting and promoting the human lover’s flourishing, the human lover would not even have a point of reference to reciprocate—aside from indirectly promoting his or her own flourishing. If such a love would occur between human persons, it would imply one person completely giving up her own identity, desires, interests, and values and solely focusing on promoting the beloved’s flourishing. Undoubtedly, this reminds one of the traditional ideal of the house-wife—as eerily depicted in another science fiction movie, The Stepford Wives (Brian Forbes, 1975), based on the 1972 novel of the same name by Ira Levin (Levin 1972). Interestingly, even Levy, who strongly argues in favor of love between human and AIs or robots, admits that this might be a problem: One interesting question is whether it will be necessary to program robots to exhibit some sort of personality friction for us to feel satisfied by our relationships with them and to feel that those relationships are genuine.

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Certainly it would be a very boring relationship indeed in which the robot always performed in exactly the manner expected of it by its relationship partner, forever agreeing with everything that was said to it, always carrying out its human’s wishes to the letter and in precisely the desired manner. A Stepford wife. Perfection. No, that would not be perfection, because, paradoxically, a “perfect” relationship requires some imperfections of each partner to create occasional surprises. Surprises add a spark to a relationship, and it might therefore prove necessary to program robots with a varying level of imperfection in order to maximize their owner’s relationship satisfaction. (Levy 2008: 137, cp. also 144–150)

The final remark in the quote is telling, as it makes explicit that the whole issue is still solely about satisfying the owner’s needs and desires. The question is just how to program the AI best to achieve this goal— resulting simply in a more elaborated version of a Stepford wife. The inequality or one-sidedness of such a love is, thus, neither addressed nor even acknowledged. Interpersonal Sharing The second influential idea of how to characterize romantic love amounts to interpersonal sharing. Recently, Angelika Krebs has spelled out this idea in great detail and defended a corresponding account (Krebs 2014, 2015). In contrast to individualist accounts of love, Krebs takes mutual love as starting point and contends that such romantic love is dialogical in nature, which means that lovers have an intrinsic interest in sharing their lives: “Partners share what is important in their emotional and practical lives. […] [L]ove is the intertwining of two lives” (Krebs 2014: 22). This is expressed in having joint feelings and in engaging in shared activities, which Krebs explains following the debate on joint agency (for an overview, see Roth 2017). Without delving into this debate here, the crucial insight can be shown by way of example. Consider two people going for a walk together in comparison to two people going for a walk individually in parallel. Or imagine a couple mourning the death of their child either together or each individually. The main point in both examples is that, in the first versions, both persons not only focus on their own grief or pursue their own goal but at the same time focus on the other person’s grief or purpose as well. Moreover, this mutual attunement changes the way of how both persons relate to the object of their grief or the goal of their

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activity. The grief becomes their (shared or joint) grief, and they intend to go for a walk together, which at the very least includes the need to coordinate their individual actions and consider them as contributions to this shared activity. For instance, they need to coordinate where they should go next. In the case of love’s interpersonal sharing, having joint emotions and engaging in shared agency encompass practically all of what is important in the lovers’ lives, notably their important experiences, desires, preferences, values, and personal goals. Moreover, the lovers are intrinsically interested in doing so and in having a dialogical form of intimacy for its own sake. This includes being open to changes in their individual identities brought about by this interpersonal sharing. As Krebs puts it, “[i]n sharing emotions and actions, the partners engage in a mutual building of selves. How they view and respond to each other shapes their characters” (Krebs 2014: 22; cp. also Rorty 1987). Now, when imagining such a dialogical love between a human and an AI, this would again be asymmetrical or one-sided. Although it may be said that the AI would be the perfect agent to attune to the human lover’s emotions, actions, and goals, the AI has by definition no life of its own, that is, no identity, desires, preferences, values, or intended activities other than the ones programmed, that is, other than the ones already focused on the human lover. Hence, the AI has nothing of its own to share and cannot contribute to a mutual building of selves. The human lover’s life is the only content available for sharing—even if the human lover had an honest interest in the beloved’s life and was open to corresponding changes in his or her own character. Still, one might argue at this point that the AI is capable of anticipating new activities or values, which the human lover might come to enjoy, and which might change his or her identity. Also, the actions of the AI will change when it comes to knowing its partner better. So, in a way, one might think that both shape each other’s character. However, these changes would, once again, rest on an asymmetry and be determined by the human’s prior identity and his or her actions to which the AI merely responds. We may think of a learning algorithm here which learns the human’s preferences and, for instance, makes suggestions for books or movies the person might like. By watching the recommended movies, reading the books, and so on, the person’s character changes in the long run and the algorithm adapts. This still means, however, that the AI’s building of self would be shaped completely by the identity of its user— which might lead one to wonder whether this may still count as mutual

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sharing to begin with. In any case, if such a love would occur between human persons, it would imply one person disregarding her own life and identity completely in order to focus solely on the life and identity of the beloved, including being open to changes in her identity brought about by this one-sided interpersonal sharing. Once again, this sounds suspiciously like the female gender stereotype of being open and readily willing—in fact, often expected—to adapt her own preferences, values, and whole life completely to her partner’s. Love as Union Finally, union accounts of romantic love take the idea of interpersonal sharing even a step further. According to this age-old notion of love, the lovers not only share their lives but merge in the sense of developing a shared identity, a we-identity (cp. Fisher 1990: 26–35; Nozick 1990: 82; Solomon 1994: 193). In essence, lovers no longer see themselves as independent individuals but as fundamentally belonging together. Mark Fisher, for instance, has formulated a union account of love, which may be characterized as a strong union (cp. Fisher 1990: 26–35). According to him, lovers develop a fused self: “As a lover […] I will tend to absorb not only your desires but your concepts, beliefs, attitudes, conceptions, emotions and sentiments. […] In coming to love you I will undergo a process of coming to see everything through your eyes, as it were” (Fisher 1990: 26f.). In mutually doing so, the lovers will form “a single fused individual,” although Fisher admits that the “personal fusion can never be complete” (Fisher 1990: 27). In much the same vein, Robert Nozick states that “[i]n a we, the people share an identity and do not simply each have identities that are enlarged” (Nozick 1990: 82). Yet, given that the lovers unavoidably remain separate beings, Robert Solomon clarifies that it is a redefinition of each lover’s individual identity that creates their shared we-­ identity. “That is what shared identity means—not a loss of individual identity but a redefinition of personal identity in terms of the other person” (Solomon 1994: 193). Correspondingly, a strong union account, like Fisher’s or (in part) Nozick’s, includes a complete redefinition of the lovers’ identities in terms of the shared we-identity, and both Fisher and Nozick readily admit that this poses a threat to each lover’s individual autonomy. However, both claim that the lovers gain a joint autonomy. Fisher remarks that the “fused couple retains its own autonomy” (Fisher 1990: 28). Likewise, Nozick

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emphasizes that “[p]eople who form a we pool not only their well-being but also their autonomy. They limit or curtail their own decision-making power and rights; some decisions can no longer be made alone” (Nozick 1990: 71). However, in his discussion Nozick also leaves room for a weaker type of union: “The individual self can be related to the we it identifies with in two different ways. It can see the we as a very important aspect of itself, or it can see itself as part of the we, as contained within it” (Nozick 1990: 72). Consequently, especially the former option shows that each lover’s individual identity may still take precedence over the shared we-identity, which only serves as a subordinate aspect of one’s identity, albeit one with which each lover wholeheartedly identifies and usually regards as more important, for example, when it comes to shared decision-making. Hence, weaker union accounts include the claim that each lover is still able to reflect on the shared we-identity from their own individual perspective— which strong union accounts would deny. In any case, when it comes to love as union between a human and an AI, regardless of whether the union is depicted as strong or weak, the shared we-identity would once again be one-sided or the result of an asymmetry—much like in the case of interpersonal sharing. For, as the AI would still not have a life or identity of its own but only one that is already focused on its human user, the shared we-identity would be completely defined by the human lover. To be sure, the question of whether each lover’s prior identity is reflected in a fair manner in a couple’s we-identity is a crucial ethical issue for loving relationships between humans as well (see Friedman 1998; Merino 2004). Accordingly, the situation with loving relationships between humans and AIs mirrors the case of interpersonal sharing, only now including the AI’s very (artificial or simulated) identity right from the start—and, again, even if the human lover had an honest interest in shaping their shared we-identity in a fair manner. Therefore, the criticism mentioned also holds for the case of love as union. If a human couple were to engage in such a one-sided shared we-identity, it would raise the worry about (usually) the female partner redefining her own individual identity in terms of a we-identity to which she does not— and is not expected to—contribute anything (important) of her own. Once again, this would fit the female gender stereotype of being willing (and expected) to give up her own preferences, values, and identity and adapt as much as possible to those of her partner.

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To sum up, not one of the three views of romantic love would characterize a relationship between a human person and an AI as a romantic love between equals, and thus none would regard that love as worth pursuing. This is mainly because AIs do not have an identity independent of their human counterpart. If the AI in question is gendered female, the asymmetry conforms to traditional gender stereotypes and, thereby, reinforces sexism. By discussing some objections to our arguments and conclusions, the following section further clarifies our critique of love between AIs and humans.

13.4   Responses to Some Objections Just Give the AI a Personality of Its Own, Then! An obvious remedy for the stated one-sidedness or symmetry problem in loving relationships between humans and AIs seems to be simply to give the AI an identity of its own, an identity which is not solely focused on its partner. If it were technologically feasible to give AIs a proper (or at least simulated) personality of their own, with their own desires and preferences, would that solve the issue at stake? At least, the AI could flourish on its own terms—or simulate doing so—contribute equally to the sharing of lives, and the shared we-identity could comprise the AI’s initial (simulated) identity as well. However, first of all, this move would not eradicate the fundamental asymmetry due to the AI’s lack of freedom of the will or autonomy. Moreover, the user would still have to choose the AI’s identity or choose amongst different AIs with different identities or personalities. Arguably, this could be interpreted as similar to choosing a partner generally—even if this choice might not be a rational or intentional one. However, while the user has (to make) a choice about which AI with which identity or personality to buy, the AI does not have such a choice at all; it is simply set up to love its user (cp. again Levy 2008: 137; Sullins 2012: 400, cited at the beginning). Consequently, if loving someone is deemed to be necessarily risky and making one vulnerable because the other might not love one back (anymore), this inherent feature of romantic love would be missing in a loving relationship with an AI. Yet, even if one were to leave the choice to the AI, say, by letting the user fill out a personality questionnaire of their own and then letting the AI calculate if this is enough of a match to its own personality, the AI

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would still be the user’s property. User and AI are simply not moral equals and the necessarily remaining asymmetry makes the idea of “love between equals” (Wilson 1995) impossible to begin with. Moreover, implementing the function that the AI could fail to love its user, maybe even by outright rejection, would likely make it substantially less attractive to buy. After all, who would want to buy a product advertised as being able to fail in, or openly neglect, its core functionality, thus nullifying the main reason people want to buy it in the first place? So, we would argue that the more human-like the AI would be designed, that is, if it had its own identity and the capability of choice in love, the more the situation would become one of love between (human or artificial but full-fledged) persons. While this would arguably remedy the mentioned asymmetries, it would also no longer be the situation we are focusing on here. Unequal Relationships Are Not Ethically Bad Per Se A further critical response to our analysis could be to argue that inequalities in relationships of love are by no means necessarily ethically wrong or bad. This may even be said about largely or even completely one-sided relationships, in which, for instance, one person takes over all the care- and emotional work and expresses no needs or desires of her own other than wanting to care for the beloved. If both lovers were happy with this asymmetrical arrangement, who are we to criticize it? Granted, it could be argued even from a feminist ethical standpoint that inequalities in a loving relationship are perfectly acceptable, as long as these inequalities are the result of both lovers autonomously agreeing to them, especially the lover in the subordinate position.6 Of course, much would need to be said about the conditions of autonomy and whether these are met in real-life scenarios. After all, these scenarios are often characterized by (historical) circumstances that raise serious doubts about whether the person in the subordinate role is sufficiently autonomous (see, e.g., Oshana 2014). In any case, referring to sufficiently autonomous consent to the inequalities involved simply does not work in the case of love between humans and AIs, for the AI is incapable of making an autonomous choice in the first place. It is still programmed to take over the subordinate position—barring the economically imprudent possibility of 6  The same argument about encountering each other on an equal footing can be made when it comes to sexual relations (see v. Wedelstaedt 2020).

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designing the AI otherwise. Accordingly, a more fitting analogy would be that one (human) lover is seen and treated as, or being reduced to, fulfilling the subordinate role right from the start and without having a say in it. This would imply that this person is not treated as an equal, that is, his or her autonomy would not be respected in the relationship—undoubtedly a serious moral failure.7 Hence, we conclude that this objection to our analysis remains unconvincing. AIs Are Not Persons, So Why Care About Our Relationships with Them? Given that, unlike Samantha, actual AIs are admittedly not persons and thus cannot be treated as equals to begin with, why bother about inequalities in loving relationships between a human and an AI at all? Put differently, it might be objected that, while the lack of symmetric love in a human-AI relationship according to our analysis may be fair enough, this does not bear any ethical relevance. This is because if the AI in question is not a person, then no one is harmed by such a relationship, regardless of whether some philosophers call it a love worth pursuing or not. After all, people love their pets and cherish this relationship, even though (usually) pets are not persons. The same may be true regarding different inanimate objects (see Loh 2019). So why bother? Admittedly, this may be considered a reasonable objection on moral grounds. If no one is harmed and if no other moral obligations or values are jeopardized, there is nothing immoral per se about such an asymmetric love between a human and an AI. Still, there might be indirect effects that are morally undesirable or even wrong. Moreover, as mentioned at the beginning, the criticism we want to highlight is broader in nature, that is, it primarily pertains to the question of whether such an asymmetric love is worthwhile pursuing, both from the (imagined) perspective of the AI and from our human point of view—and we certainly want to claim that it does matter what philosophers have to say about this question. There are at least two reasons for why such an asymmetric love may be considered indirectly morally dubious and also not worth pursuing, both of which

7  Accordingly, if union accounts of love turned out to be incompatible with the lovers’ individual autonomy, this would constitute a serious moral flaw (see Soble 1997; Kühler 2011, 2021).

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boil down to the human-AI relationship’s effect on human interactions and both of which can be exemplified by means of the movie her. First, withdrawing from real people toward virtual partners (tailor-­ made for their user) may be attractive because it costs much less time and energy to get to know and get attuned to each other (cp., again, Levy 2008: 136f.; Sullins 2012: 400); just think of Theodore’s blind date in her. As Michael Hauskeller puts it: “To engage with someone, a real human person, is, after all, always risky. Not only do we never quite know what we will get or whether we will actually get what it says on the box, we are also constantly expected to take into account, and sympathetically respond to their needs and desires. Real people are demanding and do not always perform as we want them to” (Hauskeller 2017: 214). As epitomized in her, Catherine’s accusation that Theodore cannot deal with anything “real” may well be taken to refer to his inability to take into account and to respond to real women’s needs and desires. Such inability is a serious social and moral problem, though, since taking other people’s needs and preferences into account lies at the heart of each successful social interaction and of moral action in general. Interacting more and more with an AI, designed primarily to satisfy and not to criticize its user, we may unlearn these abilities, which would constitute a morally undesirable side effect.8 Moreover, if the user has to decide on the AI’s identity as he or she sees fit, this would neglect or severely diminish the possibility of encountering new, unanticipated, and challenging characteristics in the beloved, which, in turn, would at least severely diminish the possibility to grow as a person together with the beloved, as especially the idea of love as interpersonal sharing advocates. Such a love, therefore, not only would run the risk of being stale right from the start but also would seriously limit the scope of the human lover’s social experiences. The second reason to care about the quality of loving relationships between humans and AIs who are not persons is more directly connected with gender. Here, it pays to come back to Siri, her digital assistant colleagues, and the multiple female robots colonizing the science fiction universe, as, for instance, in the already mentioned The Stepford Wives or Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014) (see Anders 2015). As elaborated earlier, it is no coincidence that these AIs are gendered as female since the work they are supposed to do is gendered female as well (see Steele 2018; Costa and Ribas 2019). However, if we agree that sexism as an oppressive system is 8

 Granted, such a side effect would need to be corroborated by empirical studies.

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unjust and ought to be overcome, why reinforce stereotypes by gendering AIs in this way in the first place? Or, to use Adrienne LaFrance’s words: “The whole point of having a digital assistant is to have it do stuff for you. You’re supposed to boss it around. […] [B]ut if we’re going to live in a world in which we’re ordering our machines around so casually, why do so many of them have to have women’s names?” (LaFrance 2016). The worry behind this question seems to be that the way we treat digital assistants gendered as female will not leave our analog interpersonal relationships and the way we conceive of ourselves as men and women unaffected. In this regard, it could be argued in analogy with Kant in his Metaphysics of Morals that even if the AI cannot be harmed by our behavior and that we cannot violate any moral duty to the AI, we may fail with regard to it (Kant 1797: 237f., Doctrine of the Elements of Ethics, Book I, §17). Our behavior would thereby reveal shortcomings of our moral character and our propensity to act wrongly when it comes to humans as well. The broader critical twist of this second reason to bother amounts to the AI being the user’s property. For, as mentioned earlier, even if the user granted the AI its own identity and choice, the fact that one’s beloved would at the same time be and remain one’s property would simply make it impossible to treat the relationship as one of love between equals. This obviously holds from the perspective of the owned AI but also from the perspective of the dominant human. Hence, this—at least for now— unavoidable fundamental asymmetry in the case of love between a human and an AI would essentially make it impossible to realize fully either of the three characterizations of romantic love described earlier in terms of the included symmetry between the lovers. Hence, even if the human lover wanted to have a fully symmetric relationship and meet the AI on an equal footing, this is simply impossible. Consequently, we stick with our conclusion that such a loving relationship cannot be considered worthwhile pursuing—assuming the human person does not pursue it for merely selfish reasons to begin with. What About Male AIs? Finally, the considerations in the previous paragraphs give rise to yet another objection: in the section “A Feminist Reading of Her,” we briefly mentioned that gender stereotyping and sexism are not only detrimental for women but also for men—and persons identifying with any gender, for that matter. And while we claimed to say something general about loving

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relationships between humans and AIs, we have focused on AIs gendered as female. While it may be true that AIs are predominantly gendered as female both in science fiction and when it comes to digital assistants, it is of course possible that, in the future, more and more AIs will be gendered male so that we should say something about how our analysis applies to AIs gendered as male, too.9 When imagining a loving relationship between a currently realistic “male” AI and a human, the considerations presented in the section “Implications for Loving Relationships” are equally valid: due to asymmetries in the relationship, it cannot be considered a loving relationship worth pursuing on any of the presented accounts. A difference arises, however, as to the nature of the asymmetries: while with human beings, the person gendered as female is usually subordinated, a relationship with a “male” AI would probably subordinate the party marked as male. Such relationships would thus not perpetuate and reinforce the existing sexist social order and may even help to erode it. Yet, the AI may also be gendered as male in the traditional sense and could thus reinforce sexist patterns, as would be the case if, for instance, the male digital fitness trainer yells at its owner to run faster or if the GPS system gives him or her directions with a deep authoritative voice. Since these gender stereotypes limit freedom and opportunities for all, AIs should not be gendered as in this sense traditionally male or female in the first place.

13.5   Conclusion To sum up, we used the movie her as an example for formulating a feminist ethical critique of loving relationships between humans and AIs in general. We assumed that, within the constraints of actual technological possibilities, any real AI would resemble Samantha’s “personality” at the beginning of the movie, thus inviting the respective feminist critique. Due to the asymmetries involved in relationships of love between humans and AIs, we argued that, on any characterization of romantic love depicted here, such love would not be worth pursuing. Finally, even though real 9  While examples of a woman falling in love with a robot gendered as male are certainly not as prominent in science fiction, there are a few exceptions. In the Swedish series Real Humans a woman falls in love with her good-looking Fitness-Hubot and in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (“In Theory”) a female officer falls in love with the Android Data (who writes a dedicated love-subroutine in his programming specifically for her).

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AIs could not be harmed, as they are not persons, such relationships, would they become regular social practice, would also invite moral criticism due to their likely detrimental social consequences. This is especially true when it comes to AIs gendered as female.10

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CHAPTER 14

Patriotism and Nationalism as Two Distinct Ways of Loving One’s Country Maria Ioannou, Martijn Boot, Ryan Wittingslow, and Adriana Mattos

Love for a country has come to be linked with two concepts: patriotism and nationalism. The distinction between these two concepts has been a matter of controversy. In this chapter, we argue that one way of thinking about and distinguishing between patriotism and nationalism is via the very concept of love. More narrowly, we argue that love in patriotism is similar to filial love (love for one’s parents), whereas love in nationalism resembles intense passionate love. Our aim is twofold: (a) to get a clearer picture of the different types of love that are involved in the conceptions of patriotism and nationalism that we are interested in, and (b) to show that the kind of love involved in our conception of patriotism can be harmless, while the kind of love associated with the relevant conception of nationalism can be dangerous and easily involves “bad faith,” a deceptive faith in the superior goodness of one’s country.

M. Ioannou (*) • M. Boot • R. Wittingslow • A. Mattos University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Cushing (ed.), New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72324-8_14

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We build up our argumentation as follows: in Part I we set out to provide grounds allowing us to treat both patriotism and nationalism as qualitatively distinct concepts before showing, in Part II, that one way of distinguishing patriotism and nationalism is via the types of love they implicate. In Part II we attempt to draw the links between patriotism and filial love on the one hand and nationalism and intense passionate love on the other. Our reasoning for Parts I and II draws from literature across the following disciplines: philosophy, psychology, and biology.

14.1   Are Patriotism and Nationalism Distinct Constructs? Before we begin, let us consider our definitions, beginning with patriotism. We define patriotism as entailing a love of one’s country, a sense of personal identification with one’s country, and a special concern for its well-being. This will be further developed in a later section. What, then of “nationalism”? This poses a greater challenge. Both patriotism and nationalism are bound by a love of one’s country; this implies perhaps that nationalism is either the same as patriotism or a subclass of patriotism. And yet, nationalism and patriotism are treated as if they are qualitatively distinct: there exists a general attitude that patriotism is the principled, “good” kind of love for a country and nationalism the nativist and “bad” kind of love. Unfortunately, there is no clear consensus in the philosophical literature about how we can make this distinction. Indeed (and not for lack of trying), given the multiplicity of uses, contested origins, and historical and philosophical inheritances of both patriotism and nationalism, it is difficult to isolate a feature or set of features that (a) consistently differentiated nationalism from patriotism and (b) is capable of capturing nationalism in its various forms. We found ourselves, in short, without a coherent and universally agreeable concept of nationalism. The more we thought about it, the less inclined we became to think that rendering a coherent and universally agreeable concept of nationalism is even possible: the idea is too broad, too contested, and too fraught with historical contingency. Consequently, we came to the conclusion that, contra general use, nationalism is not one single thing. Instead, it denotes a cluster of overlapping phenomena, ideas, and attitudes that possess some degree of family resemblance.

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Naturally, family resemblances do not offer quite the same critical traction as concepts; absent structural integrity or genuine predictive power, they are a little hard to nail down, let alone employ in a non-trivial way. With that in mind, this chapter does not concern the family resemblance between nationalisms: trying to force a family resemblance to do serious work for us seemed an impossible task. Instead, and consequently, this chapter deals with one particular articulation—one particular conception— of nationalism. This conception of nationalism is the nationalism that found its most potent, and most tragic, expression in Europe in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century: the nationalism that served as a foundational condition for World Wars I and II. We selected this conception of nationalism for two reasons. First, it is the conception of nationalism with which, we imagine, most readers would be familiar. Even non-specialists possess some relevant facts about the role of World War I in reforging European nation-states along linguistic, ethnic, and cultural lines, or are to some degree familiar with how the expansionist and genocidal policies of the Nazis were grounded in a particular conception of the German nation. We cannot assume this degree of tacit familiarity with other conceptions of nationalism. Second, we selected this particular conception of nationalism because, unlike many other conceptions of nationalism, the shared etiology and philosophical commitments of late nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century European nationalism are clear. At the risk of generalizing, we can say that late nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century European nationalism is typified by a set of self-same commitments about who can and cannot be considered part of a given nation. Usually identified as emerging from the Romanticism of Johann Gottfried Herder, who famously argued against the universalizability of human needs, this conception of nationalism is premised upon the claim that what makes someone French, or German, or British, or whatever, is not simply a matter of contingency. Instead, what makes someone part of a given nation is a shared ontology, whether that ontology be linguistic, genealogical, cultural, genetic, or otherwise. However, it would be a mistake to think that late nineteenth- to mid-­ twentieth-­century European nationalism is identical with Herder’s nationalism. Whilst Herder is an important rung in the intellectual genealogy of our particular conception of nationalism, Herder was careful to argue that the incomparability of different national groups means that it is simply impossible for one national group to be better than any other. Unfortunately, however, history had other ideas. As Isaiah Berlin argues,

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the violent exigencies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century geopolitics turned Herder’s plea for autonomy into something both bloody and conceptually incoherent: an “embittered and aggressive nationalist self-assertion” that saw the political preferencing of possessed ontologies at the expense of other, more distant ontologies (Berlin 1972: 17). How, then, do these ontological assumptions manifest? We already know all about the rise of nationalism on a historical scale. However, while historians make sense of this shift on the scale of armies and cities and polities, for a more fine-grained understanding of how these intellectual shifts affected (and affect) individual human behavior, we turn to psychological literature. Patriotism and nationalism became a topic of study for (social) psychologists following World War II.  Social psychology, as we will show next, generally distinguishes between the two by treating them as two different types of national sentiments, and social-psychological research has thus far predominantly focused on mapping these differences (Sapounzis 2008). Shortly after World War II, Theodor Adorno set out to study the phenomenon of fascism as it manifested in the behavior of individuals. Given the prominence of psychoanalysis at the time, Adorno and colleagues departed from the assumption that there must be a personality trait that is shaped by the nature of the relationship between children and parents, and which explains what they regarded to be an abnormal behavior/ phenomenon: the endorsement of fascist ideology. They found this trait in what they dubbed the “authoritarian personality” (Adorno 1950). According to them, the authoritarian personality described by a constellation of traits—extreme respect and obedience to authority, obsession with status and hierarchy, and the tendency to displace anger to weaker individuals—predisposes the individual to ethnocentrism: “a tendency in the individual to be ‘ethnically centered’, to be rigid in his acceptance of the ‘culturally alike’, and in his rejection of the ‘unlike’” (Adorno 1950, p.  102). One of the subscales of ethnocentrism Adorno and colleagues constructed they labeled “pseudo-patriotism” and operationalized it as uncritical conformity to prevailing societal norms and rejection of other nations or outgroups. They understood “true patriotism” to simply be love for a country: a benign, positive, beneficial, and even necessary attachment to the nation. Adorno and colleagues demonstrated using empirical data that pseudo-­ patriotism was positively correlated with authoritarian personality as well

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as with outgroup derogation (more anti-Black and anti-Semitic sentiments in the U.S.). What they did not provide was empirical evidence for the distinction between pseudo-patriotism and true patriotism. In search for an empirical distinction between the two terms, Kosterman and Feshbach (1987) largely adopted the definitions of Adorno and his colleagues for patriotism (true patriotism) and nationalism (pseudo-­ patriotism) and examined the extent to which the two could be conceived as independent concepts. For this they created a measurement of patriotic and nationalistic attitudes to statistically determine whether these two types of attitudes tapped onto two distinct factors (patriotism and nationalism). Kosterman and Feshbach (1987) defined patriotism as love for and pride in one’s nation and measured it using statements such as “I am emotionally attached to my country” and “The fact that I am American is an important part of my identity.” They construed nationalism as the perception of national superiority and orientation toward national dominance and measured it using items such as “It is really important that the U.S. be number one in whatever it does”; “The first duty of every young American is to honor the national American history and heritage.” Their American student participant scores on the two measurements indicated that the two types of attitudes did indeed load on two different factors (thus representing two different constructs) but that these two constructs were not entirely independent from each other in the sense that they were significantly correlated: the more participants endorsed nationalistic attitudes the more they also endorsed patriotic attitudes. As Feshbach (1994) remarked, however, even though related to patriotism, nationalism’s distinguishing feature remained to be that it “entails feelings of national superiority, of competitiveness with other nations, and of the importance of power over other nations” (p. 281). Reviewing the existing psychological literature on the topic, Hanson and O’Dwyer (2019) provided a useful way of thinking about the differences between patriotism and nationalism. They present nationalism and patriotism as two distinct ways in which individuals can attach themselves to their nation. They identify three elements on which these two ways of relating may differ: affect, membership, and relations. Affect refers to one’s attitudes and/or emotions toward their country; membership is about who belongs to the country; and relation is about how individuals relate to figures or institutions of power in their country.

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With regard to affect, a patriot’s positive affect for her country is self-­ referential, meaning that it originates from the mere fact that it is her country. Meanwhile, for a nationalist, her positive affect stems from an almost exclusively downward comparison between her own and other countries. As far as membership is concerned, a nationalist and a patriot would give different answers to who belongs to their ingroup. A nationalist would set the bar to be ethno-cultural cohesion (ingroup members are those with whom she shares common heritage), whereas a patriot will answer using civic lines (ingroup members are those with whom she shares common purpose and goals). Finally, in regard to relations with the country’s authorities, a nationalist would subscribe to the dictum “my country, right or wrong.” She would hold an unquestionable positive evaluation of the country’s institutions of power and would be intolerant to any criticism directed to them. A patriot, by contrast, would be open to questioning and criticizing the wrongdoings of her country’s institutions of power. As noted, one defining characteristic distinguishing patriotism and nationalism according to social-psychological literature is that the first is self-referential and the latter relies heavily on intergroup comparison in search of superiority. Patriotism is described by what social psychologists would call “ingroup love” and nationalism by both ingroup love and outgroup derogation: “outgroup hate” (Brewer 1999). What has been a matter of controversy in psychology, however, is the extent to which ingroup love is bound to give rise to outgroup derogation or outgroup hate (Hewstone et al. 2002). The question in other words is whether patriotism paves the way to nationalism. More recent studies in the crossroads of biology and psychology readdressed this old question, asking whether ingroup love (or ingroup favoritism) is part and parcel with outgroup derogation or not. To do so they investigated the effects of oxytocin on the propensity of people to behave either more pro-ingroup (demonstrating ingroup preference and/or favoritism) or more anti-outgroup (demonstrating outgroup derogation). Oxytocin was chosen because of its repeatedly demonstrated role in promoting trust and cooperation (only) among ingroup members (Kosfeld et al. 2005). With this knowledge about the properties of oxytocin at hand, researchers in the Netherlands conducted a series of experiments asking their male Dutch participants to self-administer oxytocin or placebo before submitting them to behavioral tests aiming at measuring ingroup favoritism versus outgroup derogation (de Dreu et  al. 2011). An example of such a

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behavioral test was an intergroup version of Philippa Foot’s original trolley dilemma where the participants could pull the lever to kill one to save five (Foot 1967). The twist was that the oxytocin and the placebo participants were further split into two more conditions: in the ingroup target condition they could pull the lever to kill a fellow ingroup member (Dutch), and in the outgroup target condition they could choose to pull the lever knowing that they would kill an outgroup member (Arab or German). They then assessed whether oxytocin participants by comparison to the placebo participants were more likely to exhibit ingroup favoritism (by being less likely to pull the lever to kill the Dutch person to save five unidentified individuals less often) or outgroup derogation (by being more likely to pull the lever to kill an outgroup member to save five unidentified individuals more often). What they found is that participants in the oxytocin condition exhibited more ingroup favoring behavior than their placebo counterparts but not more outgroup derogatory behavior. Similar results were found with Chinese female and male participants. Those inhaling oxytocin had higher likability ratings for Chinese people than did the placebo participants. Their likability of stimuli associated with other Asian countries (Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan), however, was unaffected by oxytocin (Ma et al. 2014). These results suggest that ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation (or ingroup love and outgroup hate) are distinct processes for they are differentially affected by a neurotransmitter that serves to heighten trust and cooperativeness with ingroup members. If ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation are indeed processes that distinguish patriotism and nationalism, then these studies provide further support to that patriotism and nationalism are not one and the same and that nationalism does not just follow from patriotism. What we did thus far was to show that there are reasons allowing us to think of patriotism and nationalism as two different concepts. We also explained why, especially in the case of nationalism, we are focusing on one conception of nationalism, that is nationalism as it manifested in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. This conception of nationalism aligns well with the way nationalism was studied in the social sciences and social and political psychology in particular. In the remainder of this chapter we will attempt to show another way in which patriotism and nationalism differ and that is via the type of love they invoke. To show that the conceptions of patriotism and nationalism we are interested in implicate

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two different types of love, we first attempt to draw the analogy between patriotism and filial love and then the one between nationalism and intense passionate love.

14.2   Analogies Between Patriotism and Filial Love and Nationalism and Intense Passionate Love Patriotism and Filial Love The scholarly literature gives different descriptions of patriotism. However, these descriptions have the following characteristics in common: love of one’s country, a sense of personal identification with one’s country, and a special concern for its well-being. In this section, we will discuss similarities between patriotism and filial love to clarify the type of love that is involved in the case of patriotism. The analogy between patriotism and filial love is suggested by the word patriotism itself, which is deduced from the Latin pater (father). Some thinkers regard patriotism as a vice. One of them is Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy (1967) rejects patriotism because he thinks that it is opposed to the ideal of morality, which is “the recognition and brotherhood of all men.” Patriotism replaces this by “the recognition of one state and nationality as predominating over all the others.” According to Tolstoy, patriotism lacks any moral foundation. Also, Keller (2005) believes, for other reasons, that patriotism is a vice rather than a virtue. He claims that there is a connection between patriotism and bad faith. In this context, “bad faith” means deceptive faith in the superior goodness of one’s country, a faith that persists even if there is objective counter-evidence. Keller further argues that a patriot cannot maintain the love for her country if she discovers that her country has serious shortcomings. We will show, with the help of an investigation of its similarities with filial love, that patriotism, characterized by the three features mentioned earlier, need not be morally reprehensible. It may be compatible with an impartial and objective outlook and it may avoid bad faith. Besides, we will argue that patriotism need not be given up if the patria (homeland) appears to be less perfect than supposed. We will make use of John Rawls’s discussion of the three stages of moral development in a well-ordered liberal-democratic society. This Rawlsian account supports the similarities between filial love and patriotism and

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shows that patriotism need not cause a distorted view of the qualities of one’s country, just like filial love need not cause a distorted view of the qualities of one’s parents. Analogy Between Patriotism and Filial Love In this section, we will first focus on filial love and its analogy with patriotism, before we turn in the next section to a kind of reciprocity, which is present both in the relation between parents-children, and citizens-fellow citizens. Because people are neither free to choose their parents nor free to choose their native country, neither the love of children for their parents nor the love of citizens for their country is the result of a deliberate decision. Both kinds of love are mainly given, due to the fact that they concern our roots: our parents are the persons from whom we originated and our country is the place where we grew up. The intimate relation between children and their parents and the connection between citizens and their fellow-countrymen and native soil explain another common characteristic of the two types of love: the preparedness to fight for the well-being of one’s parents and for the interests of one’s mother country, even at the cost of sacrifices. The patriot may explicate her love by mentioning valuable characteristics of her country. Just as a daughter may mention positive characteristics of her father (“intelligent, kind, fair, supportive, courageous”), a patriot may describe the qualities of her country (“freedom, tolerance, openness”). However, just as positive characteristics of her father do not wholly, not even mainly, determine why his daughter loves him, positive characteristics of her mother country do not wholly, not even mainly, determine why the patriot loves it. Again, both kinds of love are grounded merely in the fact that they concern one’s parents and one’s native country, while their specific characteristics play a supportive role. If we ask why you love your father, no justification is needed beyond your reply that “he is my father.” Similarly, if we ask you why you love your country, you need not provide another justification than that it is the country where you were born. Keller (2005) agrees with the former claim, but disagrees with the latter. According to him, a patriot will and should base her love on valuable characteristics of her country. It is true that a patriot can refer to valuable features of her country. However, what she will deny is that these characteristics are the main

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reason for, or cause of, loving her country. In a way that is analogous to explaining filial love, she will rather emphasize that she feels love for her mother country because it is the place where she grew up in relation with fellow-countrymen and because her mother country’s history, culture, and language shaped her identity. When the patriot is pressured to explain what is so lovable about her country, she will be able to point out its good qualities. However, just as she may continue to love her father while recognizing some negative features of his character and behavior, she may continue to love her country without closing her eyes for its shortcomings and possible reprehensible conduct. A country embodies a plurality of characteristics, of which some are better and others are worse. If some features are imperfect or bad, they need not be a reason for decreasing love. Keller, by contrast, thinks that a patriot cannot uphold her love if she is confronted with evidence that her country is less good than supposed. He thinks that a patriot will be inclined to deny this evidence or to deceive herself by interpreting the evidence in a biased way so that she does not have to draw such a conclusion. This is what Keller (2005) calls “bad faith.” He argues that it is difficult for a patriot to assess the evidence impartially, precisely because counter-evidence for the goodness of her country would be a reason to decrease or give up her love. However, in the next section, we shall argue that persons, who have been brought up and educated well in a liberal-democratic constitutional state, are capable of combining patriotism with an impartial outlook and avoiding bad faith. Patriotism and Impartiality We will discuss the three stages of moral development put forward by John Rawls in his A Theory of Justice to show that patriotism is compatible with a capacity to be impartial. This Rawlsian account supports the analogy between filial love and patriotism.1 Rawls (1999) discusses the idea of a well-ordered liberal-democratic society. It is a society that is designed to advance the good of all its members and is regulated by a fair system of cooperation, which is acceptable 1  The concept of patriotism is not discussed in Rawls’s theory. However, it plays an important role in the transition from the second stage of the “morality of association” to the third stage of the “morality of principle” (see Callan 2006).

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to all. Fair cooperation requires reciprocity: everybody has to do their part and everybody will benefit, according to the rules of fairness. Reciprocity lies between impartiality and mutual advantage. This fairness is part of the public political culture of a liberal-democratic constitutional society. A fundamental characteristic of fairness is that morally arbitrary factors should not play a role in the distribution of advantages and burdens across the citizens of the society. Examples of morally arbitrary factors are social class, race, gender, origin, and place of residence. To the extent that these factors are considered as being irrelevant for principles of justice, the fairness that is part of a liberal-democratic society is impartial and unbiased. It is to be expected that people who grow up and live in a public political culture of fair social cooperation, in which impartiality plays a central role, will develop a sense of justice and impartiality in moral questions and will be capable of avoiding biased and distorted views with respect to themselves and others. As Rawls describes, this capability comes into existence during three stages of moral development, which, interestingly, concerns both the relation of children toward their parents and the relation of citizens toward their fellow citizens. During the first stage—“the morality of authority”—children are subject to the authority of their parents. Parental love means not only being concerned with the wants and needs of the child, but also affirming her sense of self-respect. Parental love is expressed, among others, by the parents’ care for the child, enjoyment of her company, and encouragement of her attempts to gain control over her development. Although a young child has the potentiality for love, her actions are at first motivated by instincts and desires and guided by rational self-interest. When the child notices that the parents love her, she develops love and trust for her parents in return (Rawls 1999, p. 405). The child slowly acquires skills and a sense of competence. She understands her success and enjoyment are partially the result of her following the example and norms of her parents. She feels gratitude toward her parents for taking care of her. The “morality of association” is the second stage of moral development. Associations are, for instance, the school, the neighborhood, the company, the family itself, and the national community as a whole. In society, an individual fulfills a role in different associations (Rawls 1999, p. 405). As the child grows up, older members of the association explain the expectations and virtues appropriate for fulfilling her role. Each

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association has its moral ideals, defined in ways that are appropriate for the respective role. So, as an adult, the person learns how to behave and act according to the virtues suitable for her role in her occupation and as a member of society. In a manner that is comparable to the relation of the child toward her parents, a citizen develops a love of country when she experiences that her nation cares for her, encourages her education, protects her self-respect, and offers her opportunities to flourish. She understands that her success and well-being are partially the result of her following the rules of society. She feels gratitude toward her country, so she wants to cooperate and do her part as the societal rules require. As Rawls (1999) writes: Thus we may suppose that there is a morality of association in which the members of society view one another as equals, as friends and associates, joined together in a system of cooperation known to be for the advantage of all and governed by a common conception of justice. The content of this morality is characterized by the cooperative virtues: those of justice and fairness, fidelity and trust, integrity and impartiality. The typical vices are graspingness and unfairness, dishonesty and deceit, prejudice and bias. (p. 405)

The third stage of moral development is the “morality of principles.” A citizen who succeeds in following the moral standards that apply to her in her different roles in various associations naturally comes to an understanding of the principles of justice that rule her society. Her motive for complying with the principles of justice follows from the established friendships, attitudes of love, trust, fellow feeling for others, and a concern for her society. The process whereby a citizen becomes attached to the principles themselves, and her wish for acting justly, is analogous to the way she came to follow the injunctions of her parents as a result of her love for them. In a well-ordered society, the citizens’ capacity for being impartial leads them in the end to master the principles of justice and understand the values they protect and the way they are to everyone’s advantage (Rawls 1999: 414–415). Through complex forms of the morality of association, a citizen developed attachments to many different individuals and communities. Her grasp of the morality of principles makes her understand that her care needs to be extended to all citizens.

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A possible objection has still to be mentioned. Rawls speaks about a social contract of fair cooperation between citizens who belong to the same society. However, patriotism is criticized for possible biased views, not with respect to fellow citizens but with respect to one’s own country compared to others. If citizens have a sense of justice and are capable of being fair and impartial to fellow citizens who belong to other associations, then it is not a very big step to extend these virtues to a supranational level (Rawls 1999: 414–415). A patriot need not view her own country as the best. Her adherence to the principle of impartiality will enable her to assess evidence fairly and to avoid “bad faith.” Although she feels love for her country, her grasp of the morality of principles also makes her aware that, from an impartial point of view, the place where she was born is contingent and morally arbitrary. She therefore understands that also other countries and their citizens deserve fair treatment and respect. Note that this version of patriotic love is not uncritical. Uncritical patriotic love applies to more extreme versions of patriotism and not necessarily to the kind of patriotism under consideration. Earlier we defined according to three “central characteristics” the patriotism in which we are interested. We described the analogy between filial love and this version of patriotism. In this section we explained why the patriotic love under consideration is compatible with an impartial and objective outlook. This is also supported by the social-psychological literature as we discussed it in Part I: our patriot appears to be open to questioning and criticizing the wrongdoings of their country’s institutions of power. In this section we argued that John Rawls’ explication of the three stages of moral development supports the thesis that patriotism need not cause a distorted view of the qualities of one’s country, just like filial love need not cause a distorted view of the qualities of one’s parents. A person that has gone through Rawls’ three phases of moral development is less susceptible to a biased and uncritical attitude toward her family and is capable of having respect for other people and capable of treating them fairly. In an analogous way, a patriot who has gone through Rawls’ three phases of moral development is less susceptible to a biased and uncritical attitude toward her own country. In this way a patriot’s special concern for (and her giving priority to) the well-being of her own country does not entail a negatively biased or unfair treatment of other countries.

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Nationalism and Intense Passionate Love The conception we use of nationalism has the following key characteristics: love for one’s country that is not self-referential but is fueled by the (downward) comparison of one’s country with others, love for one’s country is uncritical leading to an unquestionable positive evaluation of the country and its institutions, coupled with intolerance to any criticism directed at them. There are many definitions offered for intense passionate love in literature. The religious theoretician C.S. Lewis uses the word eros to describe one of the four loves (Lewis 1960). Eros, according to Lewis, is that state of “being in love” (p. 131), described by a “delighted preoccupation with the beloved” and which combines “strength” “sweetness” and “terror” (p. 133). Sociologist John Alan Lee identifies three styles of romantic love, one of which is eros. Eros according to him is an intensely emotional experience described by a very powerful attraction to the beloved, a strong preoccupation with them, and the strong wish for the relationship to remain exclusive (Lee 1973). Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher breaks down romantic love into three phases: lust, attraction, and attachment (Fisher 2014). The first phase, lust, is merely physical and the individual is governed by their basic drives. The last phase (attachment) is related to a wish for a more lasting nurturing commitment. Attraction is the phase of love that is described by passion (hence passionate love). In intense passionate love (or attraction), according to Fisher, the lover regards their beloved as special and unique, their attention is exclusively focused on their beloved, and they overemphasize their beloved’s better traits while downplaying or overlooking their flaws. These definitions share some key characteristics all of which are contained in Fisher’s (2014) description of intense passionate love. We side with Fisher in that description, which leads us to define intense passionate love as love toward a person someone is romantically interested in that is described by (a) intense and powerful attraction to the object of love, (b) a strong preoccupation with the object of love, and (c) idealization of the object of love. We adopt the strong view that for a type of love to be categorized as intense passionate love it has to meet all three of the aforementioned characteristics. Naturally not all people go through this phase of love and not all instances of passionate love need to be described

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by these three characteristics. Also, since we are drawing upon theories built on empirical studies, we can only safely talk about inclinations: a person experiencing intense passionate love is strongly inclined to behave in the aforementioned ways. Analogy Between Nationalism and Intense Passionate Love To draw the analogy between nationalism and intense passionate love, we show how the two resemble each other in the following three ways: (i) in both nationalism and passionate love there is a (desperate) attempt to cling on to one’s object of love; (ii) both nationalism and passionate love render one susceptible to “bad faith” via compromising impartiality; and (iii) in both nationalism and intense passionate love, love for the love-­ object is experienced as a “high” that may be bound to be short-lived (especially in the case if intense passionate love) but that is also likely to be re-triggered time and again. ( i) Clinging on to the Object of Love We have already argued that in filial love (as well as in patriotism) there is absence of choice: we are not free to choose either our parents or our native country. They are both given. Even though in romantic love there may be an element of choice, or that for true or authentic love real choice is required (Kane 1998); this is not the case for intense passionate love as we defined it earlier. Intense passionate love is often accompanied by the conviction that there is no real choice over who we fall in love with, that we are simply destined to be with our beloved. As Lewis (1960) put it: “half the love songs and half the love poems in the world will tell you that the Beloved is your fate or destiny, no more your choice than a thunderbolt […]” (p. 126). The difference though between filial love and intense passionate love is that in intense passionate love there is no guarantee for a permanent attachment to our beloved. This is to say that while there is lack of choice in both passionate love and filial love, this lack of choice has different emotional consequences in these two types of love. The key difference originates from the fact that in passionate love this lack of choice is coupled with a feeling of lack of agency (lack of control over the destiny of one’s love) which then breeds fear, insecurity, and strong dependence. Findings from empirical studies attest to this psychological profile of a person

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experiencing intense passionate love. Fisher and her colleagues (2016) have found in neuroimaging studies that those individuals reporting being possessed by passionate love behaved in ways that resembled the behavior of both a person rejected in love and an addict. In their own words: […] men and women who are passionately in love and/or rejected in love show the basic symptoms of substance-related and gambling addiction listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5, including craving, mood modification, tolerance, emotional and physical dependence and withdrawal. (Fisher et al. 2016: 1)

We argue that precisely because of the fear that one may lose one’s beloved, or because one is subconsciously aware of the transient nature of this state of love, one is bound to cling onto one’s beloved, to hold them tight, so as to preserve what one has, at all costs. What “at all costs” may translate to is crimes in the name of love. As Fisher et al. (2016) put it, even in its harmless form, intense passionate love “is associated with intense craving and can impel the lover to believe, say and do dangerous and inappropriate things” (p. 2). A nationalist now may, too, believe that she just happens to be Dutch, Brazilian, Australian, or Cypriot and that there was no choice involved in that. But, a nationalist also holds a strong view of what being Dutch, Brazilian, Australian, or Cypriot means or should mean. They are “in love” with a particular version of their country. A nationalist for example would have a strong and inflexible view about who belongs to their ingroup. For them, ingroup members are exclusively those with whom they share common heritage (Li and Brewer 2004). They will also hold the strong view that their country possesses properties that place it in a position of superiority by comparison to other countries (Kosterman and Feshbach 1987). But as is the case with the beloved in passionate love where there is little guarantee that the beloved is here to stay, the permanency of the particular version of the country a nationalist is in love with is not to be guaranteed either. Hence, just like passionate lovers, nationalists will do anything to cling onto their beloved or rather the version of their beloved they are infatuated with. For nationalists, this means investing themselves in keeping their object of love—their country—intact, unaltered. A nationalist will do so by constantly ensuring that their country is the same country they are in love with, either by continuously comparing it with other countries in a

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light that favors it or by keeping their country and its identity free from “malevolent” and “contaminating” sources. It is no coincidence that the (anti-) immigration discourse of nationalists is imbued with what in literature is known as realistic and symbolic threats, that is, threats to harming or compromising the country’s physical integrity or threats to the country’s meaning system: a threat to all those things like religion values and belief systems that make their country their country (Kadianaki et  al. 2018). Immigrants, thus, are seen as a threat to the country’s physical and symbolic integrity or in other words a threat to the version of the country a nationalist is in love with. A nationalist, similarly with a person in intense passionate love, would do anything to cling onto the version of their country they are in love with including conceding to the killing of people who threaten their country’s physical and symbolic integrity. Feshbach (1990), for example, found that nationalists and not patriots were more supportive of nuclear armament policies and were more willing (for their country) to go to war. ( ii) Bad Faith In passionate love one’s beloved is idealized and stands out in positive ways. What is driving the passion is the conviction that there is something truly unique about one’s beloved. In fact, passion in intense passionate love is compromised when one starts discovering that one’s partner is more average, that is, less special than one thought them to be (Fisher 2014). In the same way, love for a country in nationalism is fueled by the firm belief that one’s country is truly unique. If someone pointed out to a person experiencing passionate love that their beloved has certain bad qualities, the chances are that this person, preoccupied and fused as they would be in this stage of romantic love, would readily and uncritically dismiss these judgments. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies elucidating neural correlates of intense passionate love have found that there are certain areas of the brain that are either overactivated or deactivated when someone experiences passionate love. For example, areas important to the brain’s reward system are overactivated, whereas areas associated with negative emotions and areas associated with higher level cognitive functions such as judgment are deactivated (Zeki 2007). This, according to de Boer and colleagues, explains the observation that people experiencing passionate love are unable to truly judge their beloved’s qualities (De Boer et al. 2012).

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Similarly, with a person experiencing passionate love, a nationalist would react with defensiveness to someone pointing out to them qualities of their country that are not good. If they are confronted with evidence that their country is less good than supposed, then the reaction is not one of impartiality as we would expect from a patriot but a reaction similar to the one of a lover who is immersed in passionate love. We would not expect a nationalist—as we would not expect a person in passionate love— to engage critically with this information, but rather to dismiss it. ( iii) Love “Highs” Subjective experience and now research evidence show that intense passionate love is experienced as a “high,” described by increased energy (hypomania), elation when things go well, despair when not, separation anxiety when apart, and general anxiety about how things will turn out (Fisher 2014). All in all, this is a fascinating, but largely unsustainable, state of being which explains the relatively short duration of intense passionate love (De Boer et al. 2012). Even though intense passionate love is doomed to die out sooner or later, there are two interesting exceptions to this one-time “high” general rule. The first is that while the intensity of passionate love may ease out, there are cases of couples who remain “in love” despite the passage of time. There are, for example, fMRI investigations comparing brain activation of men and women who had recently fallen in love and of men and women in their 50s and 60s in long-term marriages who reported that they still felt the “high” of early stage romantic love. These studies show an overlap in brain areas activated in the two groups of participants—particularly areas involved in the reward system—when looking at a photograph of their beloved while being scanned (Fisher 2014). A key difference though between those who recently fall in love and those who still experience the highs of love but are in longer-term relationships is the amount of stress levels experienced. Cortisol levels of individuals who had fallen in love within 6 months compared with their cortisol levels 12–24 months later show that the initial increase registered in cortisol levels in the first 6 months of being in love was not observed later, when the relationship had entered a more long-term stage (Marazziti and Canale 2004). These show that the feeling of being “in love,” which is a key characteristic of passionate love, may sedate without, however, getting completely lost. The second exception is that the “high” experienced in passionate love may be re-triggered when love is endangered. The “symptoms” of

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passionate love: intense preoccupation with the beloved, emotional and physical dependence on them, craving for them, and so on may, for example, return when the lover experiences rejection from the beloved. Fisher and colleagues call this a relapse. In their own words: “[…] long after the relationship is over, events, people, places, songs, and/or other external cues associated with their abandoning sweetheart can trigger memories and initiate renewed craving, obsessive thinking and/or compulsive calling, writing or showing up in hopes of rekindling the romance—despite what they suspect may lead to adverse consequences” (Fisher et al. 2016: 2). This relapse, of course, refers to a negative “high” or, as Fisher and colleagues put it, a negative addiction. Nationalism (and patriotism) are typically seen as orientations or ways of loving that are relatively stable and difficult to change (Kosterman and Feshbach 1987). There is, however, reason to believe that these orientations must fluctuate across situations and that they are aroused under well-­ defined conditions. Druckman (1998) discusses an extensive range of studies showing that this is especially the case for nationalistic attitudes which will be more pronounced—they will spike—in competitive intergroup situations. This is why nationalism, as history also has shown, will surge, will reach a “high,” when the version of the country a nationalist is in love with is threatened. We could think, for example, of how nationalist sentiments spike during economic crises, times of mass migration movements, or how they have surged during the recent refugee crisis in Europe. We do not think there is a very good reason for nationalistic sentiments to remain elevated when the country’s existence, superiority, and purity are not under some kind of threat. In such circumstances of low competition, we would expect that the sentiments of a nationalist will resemble the sentiments of a person in a long-term and secure relationship with their beloved. Once though the country’s existence, superiority, and purity are threatened, then that will be similar to endangered love in the romantic love parallel. This perceived threat will, as we noted earlier, rekindle the “high”: one’s preoccupation, obsession, dependence on one’s object of love, out of fear of losing it. Like Fisher et al. (2016), we deem this “high” that is induced by fear of losing one’s beloved, to be a negative “high,” to be a reaction to a strong aversion that can lead someone to a bad place, by which we mean committing crimes in the name of love.

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14.3   Conclusion In this chapter we illustrated why we think patriotism and nationalism (or at least the conceptions of them that are of interest to us) to both be instances of love for a country that invoke, however, two different types of love. To build our argument we first explained why we are interested in the particular conceptions of patriotism and nationalism and why there are reasons to think of patriotism and nationalism as qualitatively distinct concepts. We then proceeded to show that love for a country in patriotism is analogous to the love of children toward their parents, whereas love for a country in nationalism is analogous to intense passionate love toward a lover. In drawing these analogies, we also showed how patriotism, just like filial love, may guard itself from “bad faith” by showing that it is possible for a patriot as it is possible in filial love, to love without biased judgments. Via the analogy between nationalism and intense passionate love, we showed how love for a country in nationalism, even though fulsome and fervent, may be dangerous in the same way passionate love may end up being dangerous. We argued that love for a country in nationalism, just like passionate love, is most dangerous when the object of love is threatened, thus explaining why nationalism is particularly likely to reach a mindless and reckless “high” in cases of competition when the existence, the superiority, or the purity of the love object—their country—are seen to be at risk.

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1950. The Authoritarian Personality. New York, NY: Harper. Berlin, Isaiah. 1972. The Bent Twig: On the Rise of Nationalism. Foreign Affairs 51: 11–20. Brewer, Marilynn B. 1999. The Psychology of Prejudice: Ingroup Love or Outgroup Hate? Journal of Social Issues 55: 429–444. Callan, Eamon. 2006. Love, Idolatry, and Patriotism. Social Theory and Practice 32: 525–546. De Boer, Antina, Erin M. van Buel, and Gert J. Ter Horst. 2012. Love Is More Than Just a Kiss: A Neurobiological Perspective on Love and Affection. Neuroscience 201: 114–124. De Dreu, Carsten K.W., Lindred L. Greer, Van Kleef, A. Gerben, Shaul Shalvi, and Michel J.J.  Handgraaf. 2011. Oxytocin Promotes Human Ethnocentrism. PNAS 108: 1262–1266.

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Druckman, Daniel. 1998. Nationalism, Patriotism, and Group Loyalty: A Social Psychological Perspective. Mershon International Studies Review 38: 43–68. Feshbach, Seymour. 1990. Psychology, Human Violence, and the Search for Peace: Issues in Science and Social Values. Journal of Social Issues 46: 183–198. ———. 1994. Nationalism, Patriotism and Aggression: A Clarification of Functional Differences. In Aggressive Behaviour: Current Perspectives, Plenum Series in Social/Clinical Psychology, ed. L.R. Huesmann, 275–291. New York: Plenum Press. Fisher, Helen E. 2014. The Tyranny of Love: Love Addiction—An Anthropologist’s View. In Behavioral Addictions: Criteria, Evidence and Treatment, ed. Laura Curtiss Feder and Ken Rosenberg, 237–265. London: Elsevier Press. Fisher, Helen E., Xiaomeng Xu, Arthur Aron, and Lucy L. Brown. 2016. Intense, Passionate, Romantic Love: A Natural Addiction? How the Fields That Investigate Romance and Substance Abuse Can Inform Each Other. Frontiers in Psychology 7: 867. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00687. Foot, Philippa. 1967. The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect. Oxford Review 5: 5–15. Hanson, Kristin, and Emma O’Dwyer. 2019. Patriotism and Nationalism, Left and Right: A Q-Methodology Study of American National Identity. Political Psychology 40: 777–795. Hewstone, Miles, Martin Rubin, and Hazel Willis. 2002. Intergroup bias. Annual Review of Psychology 53: 575–604. Kadianaki, Irini, Maria Avraamidou, Maria Ioannou, and Elisavet Panagiotou. 2018. Understanding Media Debate Around Migration: The Relation Between Favorable and Unfavorable Representations of Migration in the Greek Cypriot Press. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 24: 407–415. Kane, Robert. 1998. The Significance of Free Will. New  York: Oxford University Press. Keller, Simon. 2005. Patriotism as Bad Faith. Ethics 115: 563–592. Kosfeld, Michael, Markus Heinrichs, Paul Zak, Urs Fischbacher, and Erst Fehr. 2005. Oxytocin Increases Trust in Humans. Nature 435: 673–676. Kosterman, Rick, and Seymour Feshbach. 1987. Towards a Measure of Patriotic and Nationalistic Attitudes. Political Psychology 10: 257–274. Lee, John A. 1973. Colours of Love: An Exploration of the Ways of Loving. Toronto: New Press. Lewis, Clive Staples. 1960. The Four Loves. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Li, Qiong, and Marilynn B. Brewer. 2004. What Does It Mean to Be American? Patriotism, Nationalism and American Identity After 9/11. Political Psychology 25: 727–739. Ma, Xiaole, Lizhu Luo, Yayuan Geng, Weihua Zhao, Qiong Zhang, and Keith M.  Kendrick. 2014. Oxytocin Increases Liking for a Country’s People and

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National Flag But Not for Other Cultural Symbols or Consumer Products. Frontiers in Behavioural Science 8: 266. Marazziti, Donatella, and Domenico Canale. 2004. Hormonal Changes When Falling in Love. Psychoneuroendocrinology 29: 931–936. Rawls, John. 1999. A Theory of Justice, Revised edition. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Sapounzis, Antonis. 2008. Towards a Critical Social Psychological Account of National Sentiments: Patriotism and Nationalism Revisited. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 2: 34–50. Tolstoy, Leo. 1967. Tolstoy’s Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence. New York: New American Library. Zeki, Semir. 2007. The Neurobiology of Love. FEBS Letters 581: 2575–2579.

Index1

A Abramson, Kate, 63, 174, 175, 177, 186, 186n7, 195n1, 200n5, 228n10, 259n18 Adams, Robert, 195n1, 200n5 Adorno, Theodor, 296 Affect-program theorists, 135 Agape, 31, 107n7, 209 Agent free, 13, 15, 167 moral (see Moral) Alvarez, Maria, 179, 184 Ameliorative project, 8, 64, 67 Anders, Charlie Jane, 286 Animals, non-human, 19 Aristotle, 28, 35, 50n15, 136n23, 197, 277 Arpaly, Nomy, 204n10 Attention, 41 Audi, Robert, 143n35 Austen, Jane, 57

1

Autonomy, 14, 21, 29, 159, 274, 281, 283, 284, 285n7, 296 B Badhwar, Neera Kapur, 5, 26, 29, 31, 33, 57 Bagley, Benjamin, 199n3 Bagnoli, Carla, 9, 44n6, 65n1, 80, 223n5 Baker, Lynn, 75 Baron, Marcia, 27n2, 217n2 Beatrice, 9, 69–73, 76, 80, 83 Becker, Julia, 272 Beliefs, 17, 47, 57, 76, 142, 143n34, 145, 152, 153, 156, 180n5, 182, 186, 186n7, 191, 196, 210, 257, 281 false, 137, 184 optimistically biased, 75 as reasons, 184 stereotypes, 272

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Cushing (ed.), New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72324-8

315

316 

INDEX

Berlin, Isaiah, 296 Blameworthiness, 92, 156, 160, 162, 162n9, 162n10, 165n13 Bogost, Ian, 273 Bortolotti, Lisa, 9, 75–78 Bragg, Billy, 16 Brewer, Marilynn, 308 Brink, David O., 241, 253n14 Broackes, Justin, 49 Brogaard, Berit, 6, 35n15, 36, 195n1, 200n5, 227 Brown, Robert, 253n14, 259n18, 260n19 Burns, Gregory, 20, 244, 244n5, 245, 245n7, 246n8, 247n10, 263 Buunk, Bram, 76 C Callan, Eamon, 302n1 Canale, Domenico, 310 Categorical Imperative, 4 Cavell, Stanley, 210 Chalmers, David, 133n18 Chang, Ruth, 173n3 Character, 280, 302 change of, 176 moral, 22, 78, 135, 174, 177, 197, 223n6, 234, 287 traits of, 7, 50, 84, 177, 188, 216n1, 223, 231n13, 254, 280 Children love between parents and, 5, 22, 58, 67, 76, 121, 161, 177, 197, 204n11, 206, 207n13, 227n9, 230, 233n15, 277, 293, 296, 300–302 Clarke, Bridget, 44n7, 84 Clausen, Ginger, 195n1, 199n3 Cocking, Dean, 155 Consent, 113, 284 Contempt, 136

Corliss, Richard, 272 Costa, Pedro, 286 Cuypers, Stefaan, 152n4, 162n10 D Damasio, Antonio, 128n7, 135n21 Dancy, Jonathan, 18, 203, 203n9, 208, 209n16 Dante Alighieri, 9, 69, 71–73, 76, 80, 83 Darwall, Stephen, 223n5 Davenport, J., 127n4 Davidson, Donald, 185 de Boer, Antina, 309 de Dreu, Carsten, 298 de Sousa, Ronald, 56, 127n3, 134n20, 140n30, 172n1, 191, 196n2 Delaney, Neil, 174, 182 Deonna, Julien, 128n7, 172n1, 173, 182, 187 Deontic properties, 18, 112, 203 Determinism, 82, 164, 164n11, 167 Dignity of persons, 31, 65, 67, 73, 257n16 contrast with price, 4, 154, 224n7 Dillon, Robin, 30 Disposition, 17, 20, 50, 127, 127n5, 134, 146, 189, 224, 230, 231n13, 252, 253, 258, 259, 265 Double, Richard, 157n6 Dovidio, John F., 272 Doyle, Sady, 272, 275 Driver, Julia, 207, 208 Drowning wife (Fried/Williams example), 2, 18, 43n4, 160, 215–226, 221n4 Druckman, Daniel, 311 Drummond, John J., 223n5 Duty, 3, 6, 10, 14, 25, 27, 44, 89, 97–99, 118, 158, 160, 287

 INDEX 

E Ebels-Duggan, Kyla, 27n7, 113n11, 201n7 Ecclesiastes, 10 Ehman, Robert, 260n19 Ekman, P., 128n7, 136n23 Emery, Robert, 75 Emotion, 7, 12, 56, 107, 127, 128, 132–138, 135n21 Empathy, 20, 245, 246 Empirical persona, 32, 33, 67, 68, 71 The End of the Affair, 12, 125, 146 Enoch, David, 95n6 Enticing Reasons View, 202–208 Eros, 45, 107n7, 306 Evaluative properties, 18, 111–112, 203 Existentialism, 10, 81, 96 Ex Machina, 286 Exploitation, 92 F Fantasies, 9, 47, 69–72, 74–79 Fear, 133, 173, 174, 181, 204, 206, 233, 307 Fehr, Beverley, 130n12 Feminine mystique, 74 Feminism, 74, 270–275, 284, 288 Ferreira, J.M., 127n4 Feshbach, Seymour, 297, 308, 309, 311 Fidelity, 138, 199, 304 Fisher, Helen, 306, 308–311 Fisher, Mark, 21, 107n8, 281 Fiske, Susan, 273 Fitting response, 173, 182, 188, 190, 233 Flourishing, 4, 119, 153, 230, 277, 278 Fogal, Daniel, 179, 191n9 Foot, Philippa, 299

317

Forgiveness, 96, 139, 160, 164, 201 Formula of Humanity, Kant’s, 29 Foundationalism, 143, 143n35 Fowers, Blaine, 75 Frank, Lily, 276 Frankfurt, Harry, 10, 15, 18, 19, 21, 63, 65, 98, 127n4, 153, 155, 156, 158, 196n2, 204n11, 215, 217n2, 220–222, 227–230, 231n13, 237, 253n14, 254n15, 257, 257n17, 260n19, 277 Franklin-Hall, Andrew, 20, 253n14, 256–259, 265 Freud, Sigmund, 3, 31 Fried, Charles, 2, 18, 216 Friedan, Betty, 74 Friedman, Marilyn, 282 Friendship, 5, 14, 25, 27–32, 35, 70, 87, 90, 93, 129, 137, 155, 159, 216n1, 232, 234, 304 Kantian, 28 sexual, 130, 139 Fromm, Erich, 22 Frowe, Helen, 103 Fungibility, 29, 140n30, 186, 262 G Gender, 8, 79, 85, 274, 286, 287, 303 roles, 273 stereotype, 21, 270, 274, 281, 287 Gerschwin, George and Ira, 94n5 Gert, Joshua, 200n4 Gertler, Brie, 133n18 Giles, James, 253n14 Glick, Peter, 272, 273 Good, the, 45n8, 55, 59, 82, 210 Grau, Christopher, 187, 189n8, 260n19 Green, O.H., 153, 153n5, 254n15 Greene, Graham, 12, 125, 126n2, 129n9 Greenspan, Patricia, 200n4

318 

INDEX

Gregoratto, Federica, 272, 274, 276 Grenberg, Jeanine, 65n1 Grief, 154, 215, 241, 243n3, 279 Griffiths, Paul, 135n22 H Habermas, Jürgen, 271 Haines, Elizabeth, 272 Han, Yongming, 189 Hanson, Kristin, 297 Harcourt, Edward, 68 Haslanger, Sally, 8, 64 Hauskeller, Michael, 276n4, 286 Hegel, G.W.F., 81 Helm, Bennett, 106n6, 107n7, 116n13, 141n32, 233n16, 253n14, 257, 257n17, 260n19, 277n5 Her (film), 21, 269 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 295 Hoffman, Eric, 259n18 Hoffmann, Magdalena, 276 hooks, bell, 64, 71, 74 Hopwood, Mark, 7, 43, 45 Hornsby, Jennifer, 184n6 Hurka, Thomas, 20, 195n1, 199n3, 253–256, 258, 259, 265 Hyman, John, 184n6 I Illusions, positive, 75 Ingroup, 298, 299, 308 Inherent value, 19, 44, 65, 216, 216n1, 223–225, 223n6, 224n7, 225n8, 227, 229, 233, 233n16, 235, 237, 238, 257n16 J Jaworska, Agnieszka, 20, 253n14, 256–259, 265 Jesus, 60

John, Eileen, 83 Jollimore, Troy, 56n23, 63, 175, 176, 195n1, 198, 200n5, 217n2, 253n14, 259n18, 261n19, 262n20 Jonze, Spike, 21, 269, 271 Jordan, Jessy, 47n11 Jus in bello, 104 Just War Theory, 10, 102–106 K Kadianaki, Irini, 309 Kagan, Shelly, 200n5 Kant, Immanuel, 3–5, 14, 22, 25, 27–29, 32, 44, 65, 66n2, 81, 154, 206, 217, 224n7, 287 Keller, Simon, 39n1, 63, 174, 182, 195n1, 217n2, 235, 300, 301 Kennett, Jeanette, 155 Kimmel, Michael, 275 Knowledge, moral, 51 Kolodny, Niko, 10, 15, 18, 19, 63, 93n4, 153, 154, 176, 177, 184, 185, 189, 195n1, 199n3, 200n5, 207, 221, 228n10, 231n13, 232–234, 253n14, 257, 260n19 Korsgaard, Christine, 173n3 Kosfeld, Michael, 298 Kosterman, Rick, 297, 308, 311 Kraut, Robert, 176, 260n19 Krebs, Angelika, 21, 279 Krenwinkel, Patricia, 131n14 Kroeker, Esther Engels, 195n1, 202, 207n12 L LaFollette, Hugh, 253n14, 260n19 LaFrance, Adrienne, 273, 287 Lamb, Roger, 158, 162n8, 260n19 Landrum, Ty, 260n19 Lazarus, R.S., 128n7, 135n21, 136n23

 INDEX 

Lee, John Alan, 306 Leite, Adam, 63, 174, 175, 177, 186, 186n7, 195n1, 200n5, 228n10, 259n18 Levy, David, 270, 278, 279, 283, 286 Lewis, C.S., 306, 307 Li, Qiong, 308 Liao, S. Matthew, 207n13 Little, Margaret Olivia, 200n4, 202, 203n9 The Little Prince, 10, 88 Loh, Janina, 285 Lopez-Cantero, Pilar, 8, 68, 69, 71 Lord, Errol, 184, 204n10 Lovable, 17, 59, 59n25, 67, 151, 159, 163, 174 Love as actively attending, 72, 77 as arresting awareness, 44 Christian, 60n26 commitments of, 138–144 dual account of, 226 epistemic role of, 42 ersatz, 14, 157 filial (see children) as historical, 159 incomplete, 254 ingroup, 23, 298 meaningful, 20, 21, 65, 70, 71, 75, 84, 263, 264 moral (Kantian), 26, 27, 32 “natural,” 27 parental (see children) passionate, 294, 300–312 “pathological,” 27n2, 28, 44 as perception, 42 phenomenology of, 56, 107, 128n6 as a practice, 83 as a psychological condition, 245, 249, 260 as really looking, 65 requirements of, 158–159, 227

319

romantic, 26, 35, 36, 58, 87, 99, 129, 130n12, 133, 138, 145, 153n5, 187, 208n14, 216n1, 234, 242, 247, 247n9, 269, 275, 277, 279, 281, 283, 306, 309 selectivity of, 7, 58, 67, 68, 140, 175, 178, 231, 231n13, 232 sexual, 58 sibling, 234 triangular theory of, 12, 127, 127n3 tripartite theory of, 20, 243, 261–265 as a union, 21, 107n8, 140, 270, 275, 276n3, 281–283, 285n7 unrequited, 10, 76, 99, 249 as valuing, 67 as a verb, 64, 72 as a virtue, 50 M M and D Iris Murdoch example, 6, 7, 9, 42, 47, 49, 49n13, 50, 52, 59, 72, 80, 82 Ma, Xiaole, 299 Macnamara, Coleen, 200n4, 202 Manne, Kate, 78, 273, 273n1, 275 Marazziti, Donatella, 310 Mason, Elinor, 217n2 Matthew, 60 McDowell, John, 49n14, 184n6 McLean, Mark, 50n15 Mele, Alfred, 13, 120n15, 152, 156 Merino, Noël, 282 Merritt, Melissa McBay, 65n1 Millgram, Elijah, 68 Milligan, Tony, 65, 65n1, 66n2, 243n3, 243n4 Moral agent, 6, 10, 15, 26, 219, 235 Moral realism, 46

320 

INDEX

Mulhall, Stephen, 48n12 Murdoch, Iris, 3, 6, 7, 9, 39–60, 64, 66, 72, 80, 82 Murray, Sandra, 76 N Naar, Hichem, 57, 174, 177, 187, 195n1, 198, 245 Narrative, 68 Nationalism, 22, 293–312 Nebel, Jacob, 203n9 Needs in a relationship, 90, 91 Neu, Jerome, 201n8 New Testament, 5, 8, 60 Noggle, Robert, 30 Noller, Patricia, 253n14, 259n18 Nonsubstitutability, problem of, 31, 176, 183, 186, 231n13, 233n16, 260, 262, 264 No Reasons View, 15–17, 189, 192, 196–200, 196n2, 205, 210 Nozick, Robert, 21, 260n19, 281, 282 Nyholm, Sven, 276 O Oakley, Justin, 159 Obsession, 119, 247, 251, 252n13, 253, 254, 296, 311 O’Dwyer, Emma, 297 One Bad Day (thought experiment), 13, 152 Oshana, Marina, 284 Othello, 2, 41, 53, 57 Oxytocin, 23, 298 P Parfit, Derek, 184 Partiality, 2, 5, 18, 25, 39n1, 206, 219, 222, 224

Passion, 5, 12, 23, 27, 127–129, 128n6, 133n19, 138, 172, 182, 293, 306–307, 309 sexual, 131 Paton, H.J., 27n2 Patriotism, 22, 293–312 Perception value neutral, 48 Pereboom, Derk, 14, 153, 163–168 Pettit, Philip, 158n7, 207n12 Phenomenal concepts, 133n18 Phenomenology, 44n6, 99, 128, 190, 205 Philia, 107n7, 277 Pismenny, Arina, 261n19 Plato, 1, 40n2, 45, 50n15, 65n1, 210 Pride and Prejudice, 57 Prinz, Jesse, 128n7, 135, 135n21, 261n19 Protasi, Sara, 177, 195n1 R Radical reversal cases, 155, 159, 162, 166 Rawls, John, 300 theory of moral development, 302–305 Raz, Joseph, 173n3, 184, 203n9 Real Humans, 288n9 Reasons agent-relative, 198 different types of, 179 enticing, 18, 203n9, 209n16, 210 exclusionary, 198, 209 explanatory, 180, 197 maximum, 236 non-insistent, 200n5 normative, 181 responsivity to, 183 special, 178, 216, 226, 234–237 warranting, 17, 199–202, 208

 INDEX 

Relationship, 1, 8–10, 14, 15, 18, 20, 21, 26, 33, 36, 50, 53, 58, 63, 65, 70, 72, 75, 76, 93, 95, 97, 97n7, 99, 103, 106, 109, 110, 112, 118, 122, 128, 129, 131, 132n17, 137, 140, 151, 158, 159, 163, 174, 177, 182, 189, 198, 207, 208n14, 216n1, 220–222, 225, 227, 229–235, 237, 245, 248, 266, 269, 271, 273, 275–288, 306, 310 theory of love, 93n4, 178n4, 199n3, 232, 233n15, 257 Respect, 98 Kantian interpretation of, 4, 28, 44, 65, 205, 223, 226, 257n16 Responsibility externalism (historicism), 13, 152 internalism (anti-historicism), 13, 152, 157, 157n6 prospective, 89, 93, 99 retrospective, 89, 92 second-order, 96 skepticism, 13, 163, 165 Ribas, Luísa, 286 Rich, Adrienne, 70, 79 Ricœur, Paul, 271 Robertson, Simon, 203n9 Romeo and Juliet, 129 Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg, 139n29, 187, 280 Roth, Abraham Sesshu, 279 Rudman, Laurie, 272 Rusbult, Caryl, 76 S Safina, Carl, 20, 244, 246, 247n10, 251, 253, 264 Sapounzis, Antonis, 296 Scanlon, T.M., 184, 200n4 Schauber, Nancy, 56

321

Schaubroeck, Katrien, 202, 207n12 Schroeder, Mark, 173n3 Schroeder, Timothy, 204n10 Science, 7, 81, 84 Science fiction, 278, 286, 288, 288n9 Seinfeld, 12 Sensen, Oliver, 27n2 Sentiments, 159–163, 186–189, 281 Setiya, Kieran, 16, 56, 175, 177, 178, 178n4, 190, 195n1, 198, 200n5, 201n8, 205 Sexual attraction, 127, 131, 133, 145 Sexual relations, 284n6 Shakespeare, William, 16, 31, 129, 130n11, 139 Shpall, Sam, 20, 243, 253n14, 259n18, 261–265 Sibley, Chris, 272 Smilansky, Saul, 167n17 Smith, Michael, 207 Smuts, Aaron, 63, 177, 189, 196n2, 201n8, 202, 245n6, 253n14, 261n19 Smyth, Nicholas, 217n2, 218, 219n3 Soble, Alan, 253n14, 261n19, 285n7 Solomon, Robert, 21, 96, 107n8, 141n31, 195n1, 197, 260n19, 281 Star Trek, 288n9 Steele, Chandra, 273, 286 The Stepford Wives, 278, 286 Stereotype, 21, 79, 270, 272, 273, 275, 281, 282, 287, 288 Sternberg, R.J., 12, 127, 129, 130n13, 131n15, 142 Stocker, Michael, 10, 98 Strawson, Galen, 167n17 Sullins, John P., 270, 278, 283, 286 Supererogatory, 97, 112, 201 Swan Lake, 52 Sylvan, Kurt, 204n10

322 

INDEX

T Taking responsibility, 9, 87–99 Teasdale, J.D., 137n24 Teroni, Fabrice, 128n7, 172n1, 173, 182, 187 Thomas, Laurence, 155 Thought, one too many, 3, 18, 217–220 Tolstoy, Leo, 300 Trading up, 16, 175, 186, 198 V Valian, Virginia, 272 Valuation, 19, 31, 32, 34, 154, 155, 222, 225, 226, 238 van den Eijnden, Regina, 76 Velleman, J. David, 3, 5, 7, 8, 15, 18, 19, 26, 29, 31–36, 43–45, 64–69, 71, 73, 116n13, 154, 162n8, 178, 178n4, 195n1, 198, 199n3, 201n6, 205, 207, 215, 217n2, 222–227, 229, 232, 237, 253n14, 257n16, 260n19 Virtues, 50, 60, 92 unity of, 53 Volition, 12, 127n4, 128, 143, 153, 228, 257, 277 Vow, marital, 10, 95–97, 138, 138n27 W Wallace, R. Jay, 207n12 Watson, Gary, 157n6 Wedelstaedt, Almut Kristine, 284n6

Wedgwood, Ralph, 204n10 Weil, Simone, 60n26 Well-being, 94 White, Richard, 253n14, 254n15, 260n19 Whiting, Daniel, 200n4 Widdows, Heather, 78n5 Williams, Bernard, 2, 18, 25, 39, 43n4, 160, 216, 217, 219n3, 220, 222, 225n8 Williams-Beuren Syndrome, 20, 250, 250n11 Williamson, Timothy, 184n6 Wilson, John, 284 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 126n2, 210 Wolf, Naomi, 74 Wolf, Susan, 9, 53n19, 59n25, 92, 96, 217n2, 218, 228n11 Wollheim, Richard, 187 Wonderly, Monique, 245, 247n9, 252, 253n14, 254n15, 261n19 Wynne, Clive, 20, 244, 244n5, 248, 250, 250n11, 251, 253, 256, 259, 263, 265 Y Yeats, W. B., 16 Z Zangwill, Nick, 9, 11, 63, 173, 196n2, 253n14, 261n19 Zeki, Semir, 309