Love [addendum]
Since the middle of the twentieth century, analytic philosophers have taken diverse interests in love. Philosophers of mind have asked what kind of psychological state love is. A natural answer is that love is an emotion like any other. Some philosophers, however, find love to be an anomalous emotion, or even not to be an emotion at all. Most types of emotions seem to be triggered by, or partially to consist in, a belief that the emotion is warranted by some fact about its object. Fear of something, for example, typically involves the thought that the thing feared is dangerous or threatening. Love seems to be an exception, since it is unclear what fact about one's beloved might warrant one's love for this person. Some are willing to accept love as an emotion despite this anomaly, while others insist that love must be a psychological state of a different kind. The most commonly proposed alternative is that love is a desire, or set of desires, regarding one's beloved.
The view that love is an anomalous emotion stems from a perception that nothing warrants or justifies it. This raises a second issue that has occupied philosophers: whether there are reasons for love, and if so, what these reasons might be. The most natural candidates for reasons for love would seem to be properties or qualities of the beloved, such as wit, beauty, or kindness. Among many problems with this proposal, three have attracted especially close attention. First, some find the proposal fetishistic, or at least misdirected. It appears to represent love as focused on the beloved's accidental properties, rather than on that person's essence. Second, if one's reasons for loving the beloved are properties, then one's love ought to wane as the beloved loses those properties. This seems at odds with the thought, famously expressed by William Shakespeare, that "Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds." Finally, if one's reasons for loving the beloved are properties, then insofar as one's love is responsive to those reasons, it will soon migrate to another person with those properties in sufficient proportion. This too seems antithetical to love.
Impressed by some of these problems, Harry Frankfurt concludes that while love creates reasons, there are no reasons for love. Love is a structure of desires for which there is no antecedent justification. Love is focused on the particular person whom one loves; it is not a response to some generalizable, justifying property that the person has. Since Jane, say, is the particular person she is and she can neither lose this trait nor share it with anyone else, one's love for her does not alter as it alteration finds, nor does it transfer to her twin. David Velleman (1999), resisting Frankfurt's conclusion, suggests that love is a response to a justifying feature that is also identical with the beloved's essence: Jane's rational nature or capacity for valuation, for instance. However, this suggestion seems to leave one's beloved vulnerable to being replaced—indeed, replaced by any other person with a rational nature. A different strategy for avoiding Frankfurt's conclusion is to suggest that love is a response to the reasons provided by one's shared history with the person one loves. This would explain why one's love does not alter as the beloved's wit or beauty fades, and why one's love does not accept a substitute with whom no such history is shared. However, the appeal to shared history again threatens to make love focused on the beloved's accidental properties, rather than on that person's essence. It also seems to put the cart before the horse. Love seems to precede many relationships, rather than develop with them.
Moral philosophers have been particularly concerned that love, and similar attitudes such as friendship, are in tension with morality, at least as understood in certain theories. The tension is thought to arise because these moral theories—most notably, utilitarianism and Kantianism—require one to be impartial, that is, to give equal weight to everyone's interests. Love, in contrast, seems to impel one to be partial: to give greater weight to the interests of one's beloved. The tension has been thought to be more acute at the level of deliberation than at the level of action. While there may be utilitarian and Kantian justifications for permissions, or even requirements, to act as love directs, deliberating in terms of such justifications seems incompatible with love. This incompatibility has generally been seen as a problem for such moral theories, rather than as a problem for love. The incompatibility makes these moral theories seem self-defeating or overly demanding, or it reveals that they fail to take into account something of genuine value.
In defense of these moral theories, some philosophers have insisted that the incompatibility is only apparent. Indirect utilitarians have pointed out that while utilitarianism requires one to do what is best from an impartial standpoint, utilitarianism need not require one to deliberate in impartial terms. Indeed, there may be strong utilitarian reasons for not so deliberating. Kantians have similarly observed that the moral agent need not always be guided by specific reflection on what it is morally permissible to do. A less concessive Kantian response appears in Velleman's work. Love, he argues, is a "moral emotion," by which he seems to mean, at least in part, that love is animated by the same value that underlies morality itself.
Other philosophers, however, have insisted that the incompatibility is real. Some of these philosophers urge rejecting impartial moral theories, perhaps in favor of a virtue-based approach. Others see the incompatibility as casting doubt not on the impartiality of morality, but instead on its authority over our lives.
Friendship; Moral Psychology; Virtue and Vice; Virtue Ethics.
Bibliography
Frankfurt, Harry. Necessity, Volition, and Love. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Frankfurt, Harry. The Reasons of Love. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Green, O. H. "Is Love an Emotion?" In Love Analyzed, edited by Roger E. Lamb. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997.
Keller, Simon. "How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Properties." American Philosophical Quarterly 37 (2) (2000): 163–173.
Kolodny, Niko. "Love as Valuing a Relationship." Philosophical Review 112 (2) (2003): 135–189.
Taylor, Gabriele. "Love." Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 76 (1975–1976): 147–164.
Velleman, David. "Love as a Moral Emotion." Ethics 109 (2) (1999): 338–374.
Williams, Bernard. "Persons, Character, and Morality." In his Moral Luck. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Wolf, Susan. "Morality and Partiality." Philosophical Perspectives 6 (1992): 243–259.
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