86 Love that this is a morally neutral point: the reasons for love can come from across the moral spectrum (from good to possibly bad), and the reasons can be morally good while the object of love has additional immoral properties that do not serve as the basis of love, which raises interesting question about the morality of the love (as we will briefl y see in ch. 9 ). We now come to the second question, which is what it means to love someone for who he or she really is. This claim usually means that the reasons for love should not be superfi cial properties of the beloved, but ones that, in some sense, defi ne her. They are properties that are important to who she is, either subjectively or objectively understood. For example, if the crucial properties that Syrine has are her wit, sense of humor, and joyfulness, to love Syrine for who she really is, is to love her because of these properties. When people often demand to be loved for who they are, it seems that this is what they are demanding: to be loved for or on the basis of properties that are, in some sense to be cashed out, that are important to who they are. This nicely brings us to the different types of properties on the basis of which we can love someone. The Different Bases of Love The properties that can be the basis of love come in different types. Let us consider some of the important ones. Properties can be distinguished from each other in at least fi ve different ways (cf. Soble 1990 , 228). Essential vs. Accidental Properties A property is essential if without it the object ceases to be what it is. For example, if the property of being odd is an essential property of the number three, the number three cannot be the number three without its being odd. The Judeo-Christian-Islamic God, to give another example, has the essential property of being morally perfect (in addition to being omnipotent, etc.); remove this property and God is no longer God. An accidental property is one that an entity can lose without its ceasing to exist. For example, that I own 4,476 books is an accidental property of mine. If I lose it—say, I give away three books—I am still the same person. I also have the property of having ten fi ngers; if I lose this property (I get one fi nger chopped off), I am still the same person. Philosophers are frugal when it comes to people’s essential properties, leaning toward the view that most people’s properties are accidental: Could Socrates have been a shoemaker instead of a philosopher and still be Socrates? Yes! Examples of essential properties of people include: being a person, being made of molecules, and coming from a particular sperm and egg (if another person has every property I have, including the same name, except that he came from a different sperm and egg, he would not be me, but someone else).
The Characteristics and the Object of Love 87 Important vs. Unimportant Properties Even though being a philosopher is not an essential property of Socrates, it is an important property of his. In some sense, he would not be the same person had he not been a philosopher. He would still be the same person in a metaphysical sense—we still point to him and say, “There goes Socrates”—but he changes deeply—we point to him and say, “Poor Socrates. He’s never been the same since he lost his ability to teach philosophy.” (Note that whether a property is important is not always up to the person to decide. It depends on whether it defi nes who the person is.) Some of his unimportant properties might be wearing an off-white toga for most of his life, or gesticulating while speaking. Other properties are not so clear: Socrates had a snub nose, and he is famous for it. Is it an important or unimportant property? A property might be essential but not important to who one is (e.g., being made of molecules); it might be essential and important (being a person); it might be accidental but important (being a philosopher); and it might be accidental and unimportant (preferring chocolate over vanilla ice cream). Mental vs. Physical Properties Examples of mental properties include being smart (or stupid), imaginative (or dull), and witty (or humorless). They also include personality and character traits, such as being vivacious, courageous, shy, forthcoming, a dullard, just, greedy, and temperate. Examples of physical properties include being of a certain height, weight, and mass or having a large nose, high cheekbones, and large feet. Again, this distinction cuts across both of the fi rst two. A mental property might be important to who one is (being smart) and it might not (being bored with postmodern fi lms). The reader can come up with examples of the other intersections. Innate vs. Acquired Properties Examples of innate properties include having brown eyes, having the disposition to be afraid of snakes, and having an aversion to heights. Examples of acquired properties include being a good gymnast, being an excellent chess player, and having a PhD in philosophy. There are some unclear cases, such as the property of salivating over lasagna. Part of the problem is lack of clarity in the meaning of the terms “acquired” and “innate.” For example, does “acquired” include the condition that the person exercised effort or will to possess the property, or is the mere role of the environment enough for a property to be acquired? Fuzziness aside, this distinction again cuts across all the above four distinctions. For example, the property of being a philosopher is mental, acquired, (probably) important to its owner, and accidental. The property of being able
88 Love to lift over 200 pounds is physical and acquired, but it is accidental and may or may not be important for the one who has it. I leave it to the reader to go through the combinations (sixteen in all). Properties for Which We Desire to Be Loved vs. Properties for Which We Do Not Desire to Be Loved This is a subjective distinction: Each person has (some) preferences for which properties he or she wants to be loved. Mary might want to be loved for her skill at outwitting people, whereas John might want to be loved for his buns of steel. Again, this distinction cuts across all the above four distinctions, and, again, I leave it to the reader to go through each combination (thirty-two in all). Do not identify properties for which someone wants to be loved with properties that are important to who one is. They are not the same. I might want to be loved because of my big nose, but my big nose is not important to who I am. Alternatively, I might not want to be loved for my ethnicity, but my ethnicity is important for who I am. We have seen that the beloved’s properties play the crucial role of forming the basis of love, especially in RL2: x loves y for such-and-such properties; they provide x with reasons for loving y . But since properties come in different types, this raises an important question: Are there properties on whose basis it is, in some sense, better to love? “Better” can mean (1) “a type of property that makes the love more comprehensible than another type of property”; (2) “a type of property that allows the love to be more constant or more exclusive than another type of property”; (3) “a type of property that makes the beloved more unique or more irreplaceable than another type of property”; or (4) “a type of property that makes the love more moral or more prudent to have than another type of property.” I won’t go through them in detail (and I discuss the fourth in the next two chapters), but a few remarks are worthwhile. Some of the crucial questions to ask are which properties, no matter what type, can be a basis of or a reason for x loving y , and, if they are, whether they can also make the love comprehensible. Essential properties, for example, might not make a love comprehensible (“I love y because y is a person” is puzzling), unless they are endowed with value, such as being a child of God, having inherent dignity, and being valued by God. Since accidental properties can be any type of property (silly, important, normal, weird, etc.), whether a love based on them is comprehensible depends on the property in question. In addition, go through the list of types of properties from above and ask whether they make the love comprehensible. Go through the list and see whether any enhance or detract from love’s associated characteristics: whether they make it more exclusive or constant, or whether they contribute to making the beloved more or less unique or irreplaceable. Note in this connection that even though some of these properties are not true of love (exclusivity is not essential, as we have seen), you can always ask whether some of the properties make the love more exclusive. Throughout, keep in mind the distinction between RL1 and RL2, even though the discussion here is more fi tting for RL2 given that RL2 is the reason-responsive love.
The Characteristics and the Object of Love 89 Summary and Conclusion We have looked at the major characteristics of love and have found that either they are false or do not succeed in simultaneously (1) unifying RL1 and RL2, (2) setting romantic love apart from other types of love, and (3) being essential to romantic love. For example, while robust concern is an essential feature of RL2, it does not set it apart from other types of love. We have also discussed the object and the basis of love, looking into what it means to love the person as a whole and the crucial types of properties that can serve as the basis of love. I ended the chapter with a suggestion for the reader to connect these types of properties to the features of love and to see whether any of them enhance or detract from these features. Study Questions 1. To what extent is it plausible to use models of non-romantic love that are non-exclusive to evaluate whether romantic love is exclusive? Try to answer the same question with respect to romantic love’s other characteristics. 2. Are there other arguments for love’s exclusivity that were not mentioned in this chapter? Moreover, do you agree that love’s non-exclusivity cannot include many loves at the same time, but at best only a few? 3. Constancy is problematic because it is not clear how it is to be understood. Suppose x loves y but y soon dies in a car accident. Their love lasted for, say, one month. Was their love real love? That is, if a love of short duration is to be considered genuine love, should the reasons or causes for its short duration be external to the love itself? And what would this mean? 4. Are our children irreplaceable? If yes, in what ways are they irreplaceable, and how do these ways differ from the replaceability or irreplaceability of the beloved? 5. In what ways is being loved tied to being dignifi ed or having self-respect? Are there also connections between loving and being dignifi ed? Explore these possible connections. 6. Is desiring to form a union or a “we” a correct feature of romantic love? Is there a way to make this feature plausible yet strong, without reducing it to sharing some things? 7. Evaluate the criticisms that I level against Nozick’s and Solomon’s views of the “we” and of shared identity, respectively. Might they have replies to my objections? Try to answer this question in connection with the previous question. 8. “Happiness” or “being happy” can mean at least two things: “feeling happy” and “leading a happy life.” Try to understand the differences between them, and trace the implications of these differences for the connection between lovers’ happiness and their motives for doing what they do to each other. 9. Consider cases in which the lover has a warped conception of the wellbeing of his or her beloved. Are these cases of real, but immoral love, or
90 Love are they not real cases of love? How do you decide on the question? To help think about it, consider two variations: (1) x believes that y ’s wellbeing is B, but such that B is warped; and (2) x knows that y ’s well-being is not B, but x claims that it is and acts towards y on the basis that it is. 10. How can the same behavior (penis-in-vagina, cooking dinner for someone) sometimes express love and sometimes not? Under what conditions do such behaviors express love? 11. Is it true that sexual desire and activity do not characterize RL2? Why or why not? And can you imagine cases of RL1 such that the lover does not sexually desire the beloved? 12. Can you imagine cases of RL1 in which the lover does not long to be with the beloved? 13. The physical and emotional familiarity and intimacy found in RL2 can be, and is, found in close friendships and relationships among some family members. Is there a way to distinguish them? 14. Are there other features of romantic love that are crucial and that I overlooked in this chapter? Consider the following examples and see whether any unite RL1 and RL2, set romantic love apart from other forms of love, are essential to romantic love, or under which of the conceptual features they fall (keep the distinction between RL1 and RL2 in mind): Romantic love (a) is an involuntary emotion (it is not up to our will whether to be in love); (b) occurs only between adult human beings; (c) when reciprocated, exists between only two people; (d) when reciprocated, it pushes the lovers toward marriage ; (e) generates social expectations that the lovers are the primary recipients of each other’s time, attention, energy, and affection; (f) has jealousy as one of its main accompanying emotions. 15. Should a plausible theory of love require that, in loving the person as a whole, we love everything about him, including his nasty properties? Or is it enough that these are tolerated, even hated? 16. Compare the discussion of the object of love and the basis of love to a parallel one about hate: When it comes to hating people, what is the object of the hate? What is the basis of the hate? Are the answers similar to the ones about love? 17. Can you make sense of the idea that x loves parts of y ? Can you also defend the following claim? “Loving the whole person makes no sense. It only makes sense to love some of the properties of the person, those that are valuable or loveable.” 18. Is there only one object of love, composed of y -as-a-whole and some of y ’s properties (those loved by x )? Or are there two objects of love, y as a whole and some of y ’s properties? Is either answer problematic? Only one? Neither? 19. Go through properties discussed in the section “The Different Bases of Love” and think of which of them best explain the demand that some beloveds make of wanting to be loved for who they are.
The Characteristics and the Object of Love 91 Further Reading A number of good books expand on the issues discussed in this chapter. Soble (1990 ) contains detailed, indispensable discussions of many of the features and the object of love, as well as essential references to other writers on these two topics. On uniqueness and irreplaceability, see also Grau (2004 , 2010 ). Bloomfi eld (2008 ) contains excellent selections on the relationship between ethics and self-interest. Fisher (1990 ) and Hunter (1980 ) adopt and develop union views of love. McKeever (2016 ) is excellent on sex and love. Hannay (1991, ch. 7) develops and evaluates Kierkegaard’s arguments about the selfi shness of love. Graham and LaFollette (1989 ) contains good essays on all types of intimate relationships. O’Neill and Ruddick (1979 ) has excellent essays on children’s and parents’ rights, obligations, and interests. Archard and Benatar (2015 ) also contains excellent essays on raising children. Pakaluk (1991 ) has essential readings from past important philosophers on friendship. Plato’s Lysis (1997a) is one of the oldest works devoted to a discussion of friendship. Vannoy (1980 , Part II, ch. 2) discusses how love differs from friendship. White (2001 ) has an interesting discussion on love, friendship, and children. Williams (1995 ) has good essays on the three types of love, including excerpts from non-philosophers (e.g., singers, poets). The Phaedrus is another extensive treatment of love by Plato (1997b). Kosman (1989 ) raises some issues regarding exclusivity and other related topics in Plato’s views of love. On essential and accidental properties, see Kripke (1972 ). A good introduction to the metaphysical issues raised in this chapter is van Inwagen (1993 ). Notes 1. Something similar happens with sexual orientations: social bias towards heterosexuality helps maintain rigid sexual orientations; with fewer dictums about what sex should and should not be, society might give rise to people who desire all sorts of different people. 2. Although much of the book has benefi ted from Soble (1990 ), this is especially true of the discussion of this section. 3. For further discussion of Aristophanes, see Halwani (2010 , ch. 2); Nussbaum (1986 , ch. 6); and Soble (1990 , ch. 5). 4. Here we need to pay careful attention to power dynamics in a relationship, whereby one person, by virtue of his or her personality, intellectual abilities, moral attributes, or gender, usually has the upper hand; see Soble (1997 , 74–77) and Nozick (1991 , 421). 5. Soble (1997 , 68). This essay by Soble discusses various accounts of union given by past and contemporary philosophers, and the tension between these views and the idea of concern. 6. “Almost” because some do not include this desire: the philosopher Claudia Card once wrote about how she and her partner always desired to maintain separate lives, precisely to maintain their individual autonomy ( 1997 , 322). 7. See the discussion in Chapter 4 of the views of the philosopher Troy Jollimore (2011 ), who claims that romantic love is a moral emotion because it is not egoistic. I think that he should have read Kierkegaard more carefully.
92 Love 8. This is what Joel Feinberg calls “welfare interests” ( 1984 , 204–205). 9. “As such” because romantic love, especially RL1, as we will see in the next chapter, does endanger the lovers’ moral commitments to others. 10. Polyamorous relationships do not falsify this conclusion, because even such relationships distinguish between lovers and non-lovers, and all we need is the idea that if x is in a polyamorous relationship with y and z , then it is up to y and z to perform certain tasks that are love-relevant and important for the well-being and happiness of x . 11. This is why statements such as the following are mistaken: “Barring impediments, a romantic relationship that never includes sex will be, ceteris paribus , a less intimate relationship” ( McKeever 2016 , 213). The expressions meant to hedge the statement (“barring impediments,” “ceteris paribus”) are not clear in this context: if a couple has a deeply intimate relationship but one without sexual activity, does the “everything else being equal” not apply? Why not? McKeever’s discussion of the role of sex in love is interesting and important, though it would have been much improved by keeping RL1 and RL2—or some such distinction—in mind. 12. Friends who have known each other for a long time and who are single often decide to pool their resources together, even to live together, as they grow older. This helps them avoid being lonely, have someone with them to help out with things when necessary, and, of course, be with someone whom they love and with whom they share their values and interests. As we will see in the last chapter, the philosopher Elizabeth Brake thinks that such relationships are so important that they merit state support in the form of marriage. 13. Aristotle’s views of friendship are of help here. In the Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle divides friendship into three types. In the fi rst the friends merely use each other, and in the second they are friends because they merely give each other pleasure ( Aristotle 1999 , 1156a20). These two types of friendship are inferior to what Aristotle thinks is the best type: friendship between people of similar, virtuous characters. This is the best type of friendship because (1) the friends are similar in character; (2) they have good characters; (3) thus, they wish each other good things; and (4) they wish them for the friend’s sake, not for selfi sh reasons (1156b6). But even the best of friendships might dissolve if one of the friends’ changes from being good to being vicious, and there is little hope that he would change back (1165b13). All of Newton-Smith’s generally necessary features, with the exception of attraction (and even here Aristotle often says something to the effect that attraction can be the start or part of a good friendship; 1999 , 1164a8), are present in Aristotle’s view of good friendships. The friends must know each other; they care about each other; they like and respect each other (they are in concord, as Aristotle states; 1167b5–1167b15); they feel affection for each other; and, most obviously, wish each other good things. Note that Aristotle’s conception of the best type of friendship is not far from ours. We agree with him that use and pleasure friendships are not good (or even genuine) types of friendships, and that true friends wish each other good things for each other’s sake (though we may not agree with him that they have to have good characters). For Aristotle’s view of friendship, see Aristotle (1999 ) books VIII and IX. For a good discussion of Aristotle’s view, see Price (1997 ) and Sihvola (2002 ). 14. For further discussion of Vlastos on Plato, see Soble (1990 , ch. 13) and Grau (2004 ). 15. And there might not be much more of an answer to the question other than that a person is the entity to which these properties attach, though there must be distinct properties that would make persons persons and not something else.
Outline of the Chapter In this chapter, we look at the relationship between romantic love and morality. We start with some general considerations about love and morality, and then move to the question of whether and how the three main moral theories—consequentialism, Kantian ethics, and virtue ethics—permit or justify romantic love. In the fi nal section, we discuss how the actions, desires, and beliefs of romantic love are subject to various moral restrictions. Love and Morality “All’s fair in love and war” is a common saying. We know very well that in war, not all is fair—some actions are plain wrong and are rightly prohibited (e.g., targeting civilians). Is “all” fair in love? Answering this question is the task of this chapter. More specifi cally, we want to know in what ways romantic love is at odds with morality and in what ways it is sanctioned by morality. Morality divides actions into right and wrong, and subdivides right actions into the permissible, the obligatory, and the supererogatory (those diffi cult and sacrifi cial actions which go beyond what is required of us). Wrong actions are ones we should not do, permissible (and supererogatory) actions are ones we may do, and obligatory actions are ones we must do. To which category does romantic love belong? And does this question even make sense since love is an emotion, not an action? Because love is an emotion and not an action, the morality of actions would have to apply to actions done from the motive of love—lovers act in a variety of ways in the name of love or from love, and such actions can be assessed by morality. However, morality can apply also to emotions insofar as we are able to assess and justify having an emotion, whether in general or feeling it on a particular occasion. Consider an example about having an emotion in general: Suppose that envy is a bad emotion. Suppose also that Rajiv is an envious person and that Sanjay is neither envious nor not envious. Sanjay should take steps to ensure that he won’t become an envious person, and Rajiv should take steps to expunge envy in him. Morality requires them to act in these ways. 3 Love and Morality
94 Love Consider next an example of the justifi cation of feeling an emotion on a particular occasion. Lucy hosts a dinner party where her friends tease her, say, about her tendency to use not enough salt in her cooking. Lucy feels irritated and even angry by these remarks. A friend of hers suggests to her that she should not feel angry because the comments were given in jest. The friend is suggesting that feeling anger at that time, for these reasons, at these people, and so on is not merited. The friend is evaluating Lucy’s feeling anger and suggesting that it is unjustifi ed. So prohibiting, permitting, or evaluating an emotion makes sense—there are emotions good to cultivate, to expunge, to strengthen, and to weaken. Romantic love is no exception, and the issue is what is to be done with it. Is it a good emotion to cultivate or not? If one is in love, are there occasions on which one should or should not feel it? If morality prohibits it, we should act to either expunge or not cultivate it. If morality permits love but does not consider it crucial (compare it to that of sympathy, for example), we may have the emotion and act on it, but no obligations to cultivate or strengthen it. If morality considers love obligatory, we must take steps to cultivate it in ourselves. So “All’s fair in love” does not seem true. Is Romantic Love Morally Obligatory? To be sure, there have been injunctions to love each other. Christ commanded us to do so, and so has Cher in her song “Love One Another.” But Christ did not have romantic love in mind, and Cher’s words can be chalked up to poetry. Besides, romantic love cannot be obligatory, because it violates the important principle in moral philosophy of “ought” implies “can.” If we are obligated to do action A , we would have to be able to do A . For example, if I have an obligation to visit my ailing father in the hospital, then I am able to do so (I myself am not in the hospital, I am not on a different continent, and so on). If, somehow, I am unable to visit him, I cannot have an obligation to do so. Romantic love is not under people’s control. If people cannot just decide to fall in love, whether with a particular person or in general (this is true of all emotions; we cannot just decide to hate, envy, or be jealous of so-and-so), then romantic love is not under our command, which means it is not something we are able to do at will. It violates the “ought implies can” principle, so it cannot be obligatory. But can people not control, moderate, even extirpate or cultivate an emotion, given time and focus? Emotions may not be under our direct control, but surely they can be indirectly controlled. Why can’t this be true also of romantic love? Although it is plausible that emotions can be controlled or moderated once they exist (even here people’s ability to do so varies depending on each individual’s psychology and circumstances), it is a different matter whether they can be extirpated or cultivated from scratch. For example, if Khaled hates Rami, it is possible for him to moderate his hatred or control it in different ways. But it may not be possible for him to get rid of it altogether or, if his hatred does not exist, that he can bring himself to hate Rami. Remember that
Love and Morality 95 emotions are typically reason-based. If Khaled has no reason to hate Rami, it will be virtually impossible for him to hate him out of nothing. If Khaled has reasons to hate Rami, it will also be virtually impossible for him to stop hating him unless these reasons are addressed. Indeed, in some cases one might have reasons to hate someone but not actually hate that person; one just does not feel the hatred. Love is similar in that if Rami is not loveable, it will be tough for Khaled to fi nd reasons to love him. And it is similar in that even if there are reasons to love Rami, Khaled might just not feel the love. Indeed, this is an aspect of romantic love, of RL1 especially, that many accept as a truism: RL1 is simply not reason-responsive, as we have seen. There is a more important reason why romantic love is not obligatory. Usually, if x has an obligation to y to do A , then y has a right against x that x do A . For example, if William has an obligation to Mary to look after her plants while she is away, Mary has a right against William that he look after her plants. If the rich have obligations to help the poor, the poor have rights against the rich to help them. If parents have obligations to tend to their children, the children have rights against their parents that they be looked after. And so on. Once we consider rights, which are the fl ipside of obligations, we can better see why there is no obligation to romantically love another. No y has a right against x that x romantically love y . No person can demand of me that I romantically love him or her. Even if y has every property x considers necessary to love someone, even if y were not a stranger to x but someone who, in addition to having desirable properties, has a history with x , and even if x can, somehow, bring x ’s self to love y , x would still have no obligation to love y (though y may have rights against x to considerate treatment, gratitude, and generosity, for example). So we have no obligations to romantically love other people. (This does not mean that, once in love, couples have no obligations to each other; they do.) Is Romantic Love Morally Prohibited? There are at least two reasons to believe that romantic love is morally prohibited. The fi rst is that love is selfi sh, a reason with which we have already dealt in the last chapter, and we have seen that it is not a good reason. The second is that romantic love involves preferential treatment. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard thought so: “Insofar as you love your beloved, you are not like unto God, for in God there is no partiality . . . Insofar as you love your friend, you are not like unto God, because before God there is no distinction. But when you love your neighbor, then you are like unto God” ( 1962 , 74–75). The contemporary philosopher Robert Ehman also thinks that romantic love is preferential: “The fundamental requirement of love is to raise the beloved above all others and to give her a privileged status in our life . . . The fundamental requirement of morality in contrast is to treat all persons as having equal worth and to justify all special treatment of a person by reference to
96 Love universally valid principles.” He adds, “there is always something immoral in the privilege and attention that the lover gives to the beloved at the expense of others who might have an even higher claim on the [lover]” ( 1989 , 260). Ehman’s reasoning would apply not only to romantic lovers, but also to any intimate relationship: friendship, parent-child, and sibling relationships. If romantic love were morally abhorrent because it involves the preferential treatment of the beloved, then any other intimate association would also be morally abhorrent if it involves such preferential treatment. Since we usually treat our children, siblings, parents, and friends preferentially, these forms of love will be morally dubious unless radically reformed. This point is important because it shows that there is a mistake in Ehman’s (and Kierkegaard’s) reasoning, which is the belief that because a relationship involves preferential treatment it is morally wrong. Perhaps the truth in reasoning such as Ehman’s is that such relationships are morally wrong when they excessively privilege the beloved or when the love is at the expense of our obligations to others. We shall return to this point below. But maybe Ehman’s reasoning points to something important: Why not radically transform these intimate relationships so that we treat everyone equally? Why should morality allow any amount of preferential treatment at all? This is a diffi cult question to answer, but a rough one goes as follows. Human beings are social and political animals. We thrive best in communities and as parts of networks of relationships. This partly means that we need to have friends, children, and social networks (whether we need romantic love is a more debatable issue; see below). And without some preferential treatment, we cannot have friends or lovers, or raise our children properly. If Rachel is my friend and Rafael is my lover , then almost by defi nition I will need to relate to them preferentially, because we need to spend additional time, energy, money, attention, among other things, to cultivate and maintain friendships and love. And in order to raise my children and take care of my parents, I need to devote extra time and attention to them, too. In short, the very idea of having friends, lovers, children, siblings, and parents becomes empty without the notion of preferential treatment. So morality will either have to accept this fact and monitor it to ensure that the treatment is not excessive or at the expense of obligations to others, or it will have to ask us to eschew intimate relationships altogether. The second is not an option, because without friendships and love in all their forms, we lose our ability to thrive as human beings, perhaps even our very humanity. Aristotle, for example, departing from other Greek philosophers of his time, thought that for us to lead a good life virtue is necessary but not enough; we also need some external goods, in which he included friends and family ( 1999 , bk. I). So the thought that romantic love is morally suspicious because it involves preferential treatment is misguided. Morality should allow preferential treatment. One might object that this reasoning commits what is called the “Naturalistic Fallacy”—deriving moral claims from ones about what is natural. For example,
Love and Morality 97 it is wrong to infer that because hurricanes are natural they are good, or that because it is natural for human beings to eat meat it is good, or that because vacuum cleaners are not natural they are bad. These inferences are surely mistaken, and in this respect the naturalistic fallacy is a true fallacy. Still, any moral theory or claim that strongly goes against our nature cannot be plausible. So even though we should not derive our moral views from what is natural, moral views should be compatible, to some degree, with our nature. If they are not, we would not be able to live up to them, which would make them useless in addition to being implausible. Thus, and to return to the objection, any moral view that prohibits some amount of preferential treatment is incompatible with our nature and so should not be accepted. This is the reply to the objection. However, the above argument for preferential treatment does not show that romantic love is morally permissible. Just because morality allows preferential treatment, it does not follow that any type of preferential relationship is morally allowed. Is a relationship between a Mafi oso and his privileged clients morally permissible just because morality generally allows preferential treatment? No. What needs to be shown, then, is either that the relationship is a basic good, one needed for a minimum standard of decent living (the Mafi osoclient relationship does not satisfy this requirement), or that it is otherwise morally in the clear (again, the Mafi oso-client relationship does not meet this requirement), for then morality would allow people to choose their lives as they see fi t, including the cultivation of romantic relationships. 1 Romantic love is not a basic good (see below), but, unlike the Mafi osoclient relationship, it is not morally wrong either (at fi rst blush, anyway). So its involving preferential treatment seems to be on a par with other morally permissible relationships that also involve preferential treatment. Morality, then, should treat romantic love as it treats other things that are neither obligatory nor prohibited: it is up to individuals to decide whether to have it in their lives, subject to some moral regulations. Granted that romantic love is not obligatory but permissible, would it be morally good to cultivate romantic love in one’s life? If the good in question were prudential—whether it makes us, say, happy—a tempting answer would be that it is up to the individual to make such a decision. 2 But since the question is a moral one, its answer must depend on whether romantic love is somehow a morally good emotion in itself, an issue I will discuss in the next chapter. Romantic love, then, is neither morally obligatory nor morally prohibited; it is morally permissible. In addition, the main moral theories agree and make room for it. Let us see how. Love and Moral Theories I focus on the three major moral theories—consequentialism, Kantian ethics, and virtue ethics—and conclude with a discussion of “commonsense” morality. I will provide the information about each moral theory needed for this chapter, with more detail to follow in Part II.
98 Love Consequentialism As its name indicates, consequentialism’s organizing concept is that of consequences. It claims that an action is right if, and only if, it yields the best possible consequences from among the available options. For example, faced with the options of saving a drowning child and of doing nothing, consequentialism requires that I save the drowning child because it yields the better consequences (a child is saved, his family is happy, only a minor inconvenience to me). But what does “consequences” mean? Consequentialists differ in how they cash in this notion. Classical utilitarianism—a type of consequentialism founded by Jeremy Bentham and championed and ably defended by John Stuart Mill— understands consequences in terms of happiness or, what is (to them) the same thing, pleasure. So to utilitarians, the best consequences are those that yield the greatest net amount of pleasure (“net” because almost all actions yield some pain that needs to be “subtracted” from the amount of pleasure produced). How would consequentialism justify romantic love? One obvious answer is that it depends on romantic love’s general effects: does it yield good or bad consequences in general? The expression “in general” refl ects the idea that consequentialism is in principle willing to prohibit particular instances of romantic love if they have deleterious effects (on the lovers, their friends, their families). But as long as romantic love has no bad effects in general , consequentialism would consider it permissible. Does romantic love generally have good or bad effects? Many people would claim that it does not have bad effects; if anything, it has good effects. It makes people happy and euphoric, gets rid of loneliness, and it provides (when applicable) a decent atmosphere for raising children, to give a few examples. But this answer tells only part of the story, because romantic love also leads to pain when one of the lovers dies, gets sick, cheats, lies, or leaves the other—and it often leads to unwanted co-dependency and loss of autonomy. The issue is whether its good results are on balance greater than its bad results, which is an issue diffi cult to settle without proper empirical research, because we need to trace the actual effects of love. The research will also be fraught with pitfalls: How are we to determine the effects of love? By asking people? How then do we formulate the questions? Should we trust people’s answers? If we get a mix of answers, how do we actually decide whether love has overall good or bad effects? Indeed, how do we understand the notions of “good results” and “bad results,” objectively or subjectively? And how do we allow for self-deception, since people are sometimes self-deceived about how happy they are or about whether their love lives are working? This is only a sample of questions that any reliable empirical research needs to address. The research is likely to be unwieldy, with results that in all likelihood would not garner widespread agreement. Perhaps we can adopt a non-empirical approach and say that since people have sought love and have fallen in love throughout the ages, it must on balance be better to have loved than not to have loved. If love were overall a bad thing, it would have died out a long time ago, so it is generally a good thing. If this reasoning is plausible, consequentialism would consider love to be morally permissible.
Love and Morality 99 Still, consequentialism has a better reason for declaring love permissible. It is always a good thing to allow people to pursue their individual lives as they see fi t and according to their own lights (unless they cause others harm). If we attempt to push people into what we think are good lives for them to lead, more harm than good would result (this is how John Stuart Mill defends individual liberty on utilitarian grounds [ 1974 , 69–70]). Since romantic love is not obligatory, and even if it tends to have bad consequences (overall or in many cases), we are better off letting people decide whether they want to be in love and with whom. We thus treat love much like we treat other individual projects that people have: it is better to let them decide what careers they want to have, how many children to have, what to wear, what to read, where to travel, and so on, because even if some of their choices turn out badly, letting people do what they want produces more good consequences than otherwise. Love, then, is in general morally justifi ed according to consequentialism on grounds of liberty or autonomy, which, in turn, is justifi ed on grounds of happiness or good consequences (allowing people liberty is more productive of happiness than not). Kantian Ethics Kantian ethics is a moral theory that follows closely in the footsteps of Immanuel Kant’s moral teachings, though it need not (and usually does not) accept every claim made by Kant (hence “Kantian ethics” instead of “Kant’s ethics”). Although Kantian ethicists do not shun the moral importance of the consequences of our actions, they favor the concept of motive as the primary one. The motive from which the action is done is the basic concept to Kantians for evaluating an action. Suppose that Anastasia, a rich ten-year-old girl, has been kidnapped for ransom. Her parents offer a handsome reward for fi nding her. Suppose that both Ivan and Alexander fi nd out that she is tied up in a chair in a shack somewhere on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. They both intend to rescue her. Ivan wants to rescue her because of the reward; his motive is the money. Alexander wants to rescue her to save a human child. Although they both have the same intention, which is to rescue Anastasia, each has a different motive or reason. According to Kantian ethics, only Alexander’s motive is fully morally right. (Both their actions are right because they both save a child, but only Alexander’s action , as Kant himself would put it, has moral worth .) Kantians emphasize motives because motives tell us whether people act out of respect for morality, for what is right (or for the moral law, as Kant often puts it). For we ought to do what morality requires of us because morality requires it, not because of other reasons (that is why Kant claims that morality is categorical , leaving no leeway in terms of doing something because we feel like doing it or because it profi ts). This point is usually captured by the concept of duty . What morality requires is a matter of duty, and if something is a duty, we must do it, period. So whereas Ivan rescues Anastasia because he wants the money, Alexander does so because it is his duty: morality demands that when we are in a position to save a child, we should.
100 Love Some critics think that Kantian ethics requires us to act for the sake of duty; it is as if Alexander thinks to himself, “There are certain things—duties—that I have to do, and I have to act in order to fulfi ll them.” But this is inaccurate. What Kantians have in mind is Alexander thinking along these lines: “A helpless child! I must save her.” Alexander need not actually think of the word “duty” as he saves Anastasia, let alone think that he must save the child for duty’s sake. Instead, Alexander, as a morally decent man, recognizes that a child must be saved and he saves her, thus acting from the motive of duty and showing his commitment to morality. In other words, he recognizes that at that point in time, the world is confi gured in such a way that something ought to be done about Anastasia, and that something is to save her. He acts to do so. This is what a duty is and what it is to act from its motive. Kantians (including Kant) divide duties into two types: perfect (or narrow) duties and imperfect (or wide) ones. Perfect duties leave the agent no leeway in terms of when, how, and to whom to discharge (act on) the duty. If I promised Firas that I will meet him tomorrow at Dunkin’ Donuts at three in the afternoon, it is my duty to do so, and I have to discharge it in exactly those ways: meet Firas (not someone else) tomorrow at three (not some other day or time) at Dunkin’ Donuts (not some other place). Imperfect duties leave room for how, when, and to whom to discharge them (don’t let the term “imperfect” mislead you; imperfect duties are as real and as binding as perfect ones, and often much more morally grave). For example, according to Kant, we have the imperfect duty to help others be happy, and the imperfect duty to improve our talents. But this does not mean that I have to help everyone be happy or that I have to improve my every talent. I can choose whom to help, how, and when, and I can choose which of my talents to improve, how, and when, even if I choose a talent that is less helpful than another to humanity at large. There is one more concept to note before turning to what Kantian ethics has to say about love, namely, Kant’s Categorical Imperative, the supreme moral principle, in its version of the Formula of Humanity: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity in others and in yourself not only as a means but also as an end.” The general idea is that we are to treat each other not only as bridges or as tools to what we want, merely using each other for our goals, but we must also treat each other as ends in ourselves. Much has been written on attempting to understand this command, but the following general explanation is enough for our purposes. People have goals and plans. They set out to do certain things—to walk to the elevator, to eat a meal, go to college, get married, read a book, and so on. In our treatment of each other, we must take these goals seriously: usually we must not thwart them and in some cases we must adopt them as our own. For example, I must not prevent someone from watching television by, say, turning off the power to his house. In some cases, I cannot just refrain from interfering but I must help someone attain certain goals. In all cases, however, we must always approach others with a particular attitude, that of respecting the goals and plans of others, whether this respect is passive (non-interference) or active.
Love and Morality 101 Four crucial aspects to this principle must be kept in mind. First, although Kant speaks of actions and treatment, this must come through the right motives: in acting in ways that treat humanity as an end, we ensure that we are acting from motives of duty. We cannot treat others as an end from immoral motives. My “scratching your back” and your “scratching” mine might help us to attain our goals, but it does not carry the proper moral attitude because we are treating each other’s goals only as a means. Second, he does not say, “[T]reat human beings, including yourself . . . ” but “treat humanity in others and yourself . . . ” Without being too pedantic, “humanity” is a term of art that refers to our capacity to set goals, including moral ones, for ourselves and to act on these goals. Third, I should treat humanity as an end in others and in myself. Fourth, Kant does not deny that we treat others as a means and does not think this is a bad thing. Instead, we should not treat each other only as a means; as we treat each other as a means, we should also treat each other as ends. Let us join these points together. To act from duty is to act from the motive of respecting morality or intending to act in such-and-such a way because morality requires it. To act from the motive of duty is to treat the humanity in others both as a means and as an end, because no proper or moral motive allows us to treat others only as a means. When we help promote the happiness of those people we choose to help from the proper motives, we treat the humanity in them as an end. What about romantic love? There are three ways by which Kantians can argue that romantic love (in general, not particular instances of it) is permissible. First, if romantic love involves robust concern, whereby each lover is attentive to the needs and the desires of the other for her own sake, lovers do not use each other merely as a means but also as ends. This, however, does not exhaust the answer as to whether love violates the Categorical Imperative, because the Categorical Imperative applies not only to how lovers treat each other but to their treatment of everyone else, requiring them to not treat others merely as a means. If love involves the elevation and the preferential treatment of one person (the beloved) over others, there is a serious moral risk that the lovers might neglect their duties to others. If love tends to make lovers excessively attentive to each other, it would be morally suspicious in Kantian eyes. The word “tends” is important. The issue is not particular cases of love, whereby in some cases the lovers neglect others but in other cases they don’t, but whether love pushes the lovers to be engrossed with each other to the point of neglecting others. Still, even if love has this tendency, it would not necessarily mean that love is morally prohibited according to Kantians, but that lovers should be on their moral guard to ensure that their attention to each other does not come at the expense of their duties to others. Thus one, though not ultimate, justifi cation for love is that it need not violate the Categorical Imperative. The second reason why love is permissible on Kantian ethics is best seen through a comparison with utilitarianism. One (mistaken) criticism of utilitarianism articulated by the philosopher Bernard Williams (1973 , ch. 3) is that it is too demanding: in its zeal to maximize happiness, it requires agents to
102 Love always select the option that maximizes happiness. If by not going to the movies I can better spend my money on a charitable organization, that is where my money should go. So I can only go to the movies when I reach a point at which not going (because, say, I need a break) prohibits me from maximizing happiness. Kantian ethics is not as demanding. We see this in the idea of imperfect duties. The imperfect duty to help others attain their happiness does not mean that I have to constantly do that, let alone with everyone. The leeway I have in deciding whom, when, and how to help implies that I have time or space to attend to “personal” matters—in slang, “I have a life” (but I cannot do immoral things). I am free to engage in hobbies, to choose what career I want, to decide where and when to travel, and, most pertinent, to cultivate personal relationships with others, including friendships and romantic love. It is important to not misunderstand this point. It is not about whether Kantians make “room” for romantic love in their moral hub, but about whether love is morally affordable. If the above criticism of utilitarianism is correct, utilitarianism does not make love morally affordable, because the time, attention, money, and energy spent on my beloved may be used in better ways to increase overall happiness. Love becomes a moral luxury on this criticism of utilitarianism. 3 Not so with Kantian ethics: morality permits us to have romantic love in our lives. So perhaps the justifi cation for love on Kantian ethics is grounded in autonomy: the ability of individuals to chart their lives as they see fi t so long as they attend to their duties to others and to themselves. The third (and tentative) reason why love is permissible according to Kantian ethics has to do with the imperfect duty to morally perfect ourselves. Each of us has the duty to cultivate in him or herself those character traits and emotions that allow us to act from the motive of duty, such as sympathy, compassion, courage, benevolence, and generosity. For example, a sympathetic person is likely to be attentive to the needs of others; she notices things, such as an elderly person needing to have a seat on the bus, while a not-so-sympathetic or self-absorbed person might not (smart phones are not helping). Now if (this is a big “if”; hence the “tentative” above) romantic love has the tendency to make us better people, as some say, it would be one way to cultivate the abovementioned character traits. For example, if I am a timid person by nature, and if the sight of my beloved being treated unjustly makes me speak out in his defense, being in love pushes me to be more courageous. If, then, love pushes us to acquire those good traits, being in love is one way by which I can morally perfect myself. This might be a third justifi cation for love on Kantian ethics, but it might be a double-edged sword: love can make us, say, less generous towards others because it makes us want to spend our money mostly on our beloveds. Virtue Ethics Virtue ethics is a type of moral theory whose central and organizing concept is virtue, which is a trait of character that disposes the person who has it to judge, act, or feel rightly in the relevant situation. The virtue of patience, according to
Love and Morality 103 Aristotle, moderates the emotion of anger. Some people feel excessively angry when they’re cut off by another car on the highway (road rage), and some people do not feel angry at all at the wholesale slaughter and ethnic cleansing of a people. A virtuous person would feel anger in the right “amounts,” depending on the situation and on what “amount” of anger it calls for. Aristotle also claims that the virtuous person would experience the emotion “at the right times, about the right things, toward the right people, for the right end and in the right way” ( 1999 , 1106b20–1106b23). Note how many things the virtuous person gets right so that her emotion is properly experienced, and note that she can go wrong with respect to any one of them: expressing her anger at a friend at his wedding would not be the right time; being angry at him about something silly would not be about the right thing; taking her anger out on her friend’s sister would not be toward the right person; expressing her anger at her friend just to make him feel bad would not be for the right end; and being angry at him by smashing his favorite china set would not be the right way. A virtuous person has all the virtues. They include courage, temperance, justice, generosity, patience, and care. It is not necessary that they all moderate emotions. Courage and patience do; the fi rst revolves around fear and confi - dence, the second around anger. But the virtue of temperance moderates desires (for food, drink, and sex), whereas the virtue of justice moderates our judgments regarding what is fair to others and to ourselves. Moreover, a virtuous person would likely not display any or all the virtues all the time. Whether she does and which virtue depends on the circumstances. Finally, a right action is one that is performed by a virtuous person; if the person happens not to be virtuous, a right action is what a virtuous person would perform or advise to perform. The main idea is that the virtues are moral excellences; they are opposed to the vices. A virtuous person is a morally good, even excellent, person. A second crucial concept for virtue ethics is the good or fl ourishing life and its connection to the virtues. The distinctness of virtue ethics lies in the idea that there is a strong connection between having the virtues and leading a good life, namely, that being virtuous is necessary or generally needed for the good life. 4 For example, being generous allows the generous person to cultivate and maintain friendships and amiable relationships with others. Being courageous allows the virtuous person to defend and thereby (hopefully) preserve or acquire goods that are important to him or her. Being honest allows the person to maintain good relationships with others, to not mislead them and to not have to keep track of lies ( Hursthouse 1986 ). In these ways, the virtuous person’s life is a good life in that having the virtues makes it a good one. This means that those who are vicious or who are neither vicious nor virtuous cannot lead a good life. But because it is possible that someone who is vicious can lead a good life, and because it is possible that someone who is virtuous can lead a bad life, we should say that the virtues are a person’s best bet to lead a good life, and the vices probably lead to a bad life ( Hursthouse 1986 ). 5 Before we turn to love, we should clarify one important idea. The claim that the virtues are necessary or the best bet for a good life is not a causal
104 Love claim or a process. It is not that a person becomes virtuous and then, later, she reaps the benefi ts of a good life. It is not like working hard for a month and then receiving a paycheck. Instead, in leading a virtuous life the person is also leading a good life. The virtues constitute the good life. Moreover, just because the virtues are needed for a good life does not mean that when we act virtuously we are always asking, “What’s in it for me?” This confuses two levels. At the basic level is why anyone should be virtuous—why we have the need for the virtues—and the answer to this is that the virtues are needed for the good life. But—and this is the second level—once we become virtuous, our life goes on automatic pilot, so to speak. The issue is no longer why we should be virtuous, but a set of questions concerning how we act and feel given that we are virtuous: Should I be honest or should I spare her feelings? Should I forget what he did to me or should I confront him about it? Once a person is virtuous, her concern is with doing the right thing (but remember: acting bravely or justly can be costly; that’s why the virtues are not suffi cient for a good life). Does virtue ethics consider romantic love permissible? I argued in Chapter 1 that romantic love is not a virtue because love itself is neither good nor bad, whereas the virtues are excellences. Here is another argument for why it is not a virtue: if the virtues are needed or even necessary for the good life, someone who is not romantically in love is not leading a good life. But this is false; obviously, people can lead good lives without romantic love (this is one reason why I wrote above that love is not a basic good). According to virtue ethics, being morally defective is one crucial way for someone to not lead a good life. Although lacking courage, patience, or temperance makes someone defective—makes her a poor specimen of a human being—things are not that way with romantic love. Someone might be defective if she shuns intimacy altogether, if she has no friends, for example. But merely rejecting romantic love or, more commonly, happening not to fall in love, does not imply that there is anything wrong with her. So romantic love is not a virtue. This is a good thing, too, because if romantic love were a virtue, we would be morally obligated to acquire or cultivate it, which is a counterintuitive result. Of course, people who do have romantic love in their lives are not defective either. The good life is compatible with both having and not having romantic love. This means that the only other reason why virtue ethics might consider romantic love impermissible is if it were incompatible with one or more virtues. But it does not seem to be. There is nothing about having romantic love in one’s life that goes against kindness, courage, care, temperance, and justice. The moral danger here is similar to the one faced by romantic love and Kantian ethics, which is not to go overboard with romantic love and endanger one’s moral commitments to others. One should not, in the name of love, act contrary to the dictates of the virtues in particular situations—if, for example, one needs to be generous with one’s time and help a friend, one cannot abandon this moral ship because one prefers to be with one’s beloved.
Love and Morality 105 Indeed, on virtue ethics, it depends on from which point we approach this question. If we approach it from the point of view of someone in the process of developing his or her virtues, then he or she needs to be on their guard that acting from love does not take them away from doing what is right, since doing what is right is important to developing the virtues ( Aristotle 1999 , bk. II, chs. 1–4). But if we approach the question from the standpoint of someone who is already virtuous, then the issue is already taken care of, so to speak: a virtuous person is someone who already has a well-ordered soul or character and can moderate their actions and judgments accordingly. The danger might come from RL1, which can be so passionate that it can overrule reason and well-entrenched habits. So the existence of romantic love is compatible with virtue. But how would virtue ethics justify it? Although virtue ethics cannot justify romantic love on the ground that it is needed for a good life, as long as love does not violate virtue we should be free to pursue it. Virtue ethics, like consequentialism and Kantian ethics, then, justifi es romantic love on the grounds of liberty or autonomy. Two Qualifi cations to the Justifi cation of Love The three main moral theories justify romantic love on the basis of liberty. This claim needs two important qualifi cations, regardless of which moral theory we prefer. First, the claim is true only when people generally have true autonomy; under certain social conditions many might not. For example, in societies in which women have few options other than attaching themselves to a man for social and economic support, many women may marry men and (perhaps) eventually love them, simply because they have no other real choices. Sometimes, however, bad social conditions limit autonomy by steering people away from love: in societies in which homophobia or transphobia runs deep, many queer people may not love out of the (conscious or unconscious) fear that it would bring disaster on their heads (e.g., legal persecution, social condemnation). Thus, ideally justifying love on grounds of autonomy is plausible; in practice, the conditions allowing for genuine autonomy must exist for the justifi cation to function. Second, the moral justifi cation of love is general, meaning that particular cases of love might be unjustifi ed. Much depends on how lovers behave when in love. Lovers often go to great lengths to shower their beloveds with attention and other forms of loving. The danger is that they act in ways contrary to the dictates of the virtues or morality. For example, in giving my beloved too many gifts, I go too far. I should spend some of the money on other important things. My actions go against the dictates of the virtues of justice and benevolence. In sparing my beloved’s feelings too much, I go against the virtue of honesty (this is the caveat mentioned three paragraphs above). So while romantic love in general can coexist with morality, much
106 Love depends on how the two people in a couple behave toward each other. I discuss this claim in the next section. Commonsense Morality Unlike the fi rst three, “commonsense morality” is not really a theory, but what people think about morality at a pre-theoretical level. On the one hand, commonsense morality supplies many philosophers’ intuitions about how to think about morality and against which to test moral theories (intuitions are pre-theoretical judgments considered to be true). For example, the idea that happiness is important is common sense and supplies utilitarianism with its basic concept. Any moral theory that gives happiness no place is going to have a hard time being convincing. On the other hand, commonsense morality comprises a hodgepodge of beliefs, many of which have dubious or unclear origins. The extent to which commonsense morality should be trusted and used as a measuring rod for evaluating moral theories is tricky. Romantic love provides an excellent example. In societies that consider romantic love to be a good thing, commonsense morality often gives lovers carte blanche to act in any way they want. Indeed, according to commonsense morality, invoking love as a way to explain what would otherwise be clearly bad behavior is considered justifi cation of the action in question (this is truer of parents’ bad behavior in the name of love for their children than of romantic lovers’ actions). If John spends tons of money on wining and dining Janet, even though they are surrounded by poor people, commonsense morality thinks nothing is wrong with such behavior. Sometimes commonsense morality accepts lying, cheating, stealing, and even killing if done in the name of love. Although many people don’t accept such behavior, generally people tend to have a very permissive attitude towards actions done out of love. In this regard, commonsense morality considers love to be permissible with a vengeance. Ehman may be refl ecting popular views about love and commonsense morality’s stance on love when he writes, “In asserting our love for a person, we single out the person and raise her above the fi eld of social relations and obligations in terms of which we comport ourselves toward others. The assertion of love implies that the beloved has a value for the lover above that of others and that the lover regards his relation to his beloved as more important than his other relationships” ( 1989 , 256). But this cannot be correct, even if Ehman is only registering people’s attitude towards love. For surely not all lovers value their beloveds above everyone else; certainly, most would consider their children to be at least as valuable, if not more so (luckily, we usually don’t have to choose). Nonetheless, Ehman makes an interesting, if exaggerated, point: popular opinion, which often refl ects and is refl ected in commonsense morality, considers love to be supremely important and considers virtually any loving behavior toward the beloved to be morally permissible. This not only answers the question of what commonsense morality has to say about the permissibility of romantic love but also illustrates a problem: if commonsense morality is permissive when it comes to love, should we believe
Love and Morality 107 commonsense morality or a moral theory that places restrictions on love? I argue in support of restrictive moral theories, starting with the example of John and Janet. John spends too much money on Janet, even though she doesn’t need so much money spent on her and there are lots of people in need of help. If John were to use some of his money to help the poor, he would make a big difference in their lives. Suppose that commonsense morality fi nds nothing wrong with John’s actions, and suppose that we ask a defender of commonsense morality, “Isn’t John being extravagant? Should John not spend as much money on Janet but use some of it to help those in need?” What answer could the defender of commonsense morality possibly give to morally defend John’s actions? I cannot think of a single, convincing answer. The answer, “It makes John and Janet happy” is unconvincing because (1) John and Janet are not the only people whose happiness is at stake; (2) others will be made happy by John’s benevolence; and (3) spending less money on Janet is not likely to make John and Janet un happy, but only slightly less happy (things get worse for commonsense morality if it attempts to shield John when he harms others in making Janet happy). Think of it this way: Who are these characters John and Janet anyway? What is so special about them? And why should their being in love mean that they can morally “screw” the rest of the world? To neglect morality’s requirements, we need a convincing reason; since commonsense morality has no adequate justifi cation for its permissive attitude towards romantic love, we should accept moral restrictions on lovers’ behavior. I discuss these restrictions in the next section. Moral Restrictions on Love The fact that romantic love is justifi ed or “allowable” on the major moral theories does not mean that everything goes when in love, as we have seen. Whether love is an emotion or something else, it is constituted by desires and beliefs that dispose the lovers to do certain things. Crucial among these desires are the desires (1) to protect and promote the well-being of the beloved; (2) to make the beloved happy; (3) to be in the company of the beloved; and (4) for the beloved to reciprocate (if he or she doesn’t already) or to continue to reciprocate the love (if he or she does already). Each of these four desires can be complex, some might confl ict with each other (e.g., what makes the beloved happy need not coincide with her well-being), and each affects other people at least in the basic sense that much time, energy, money, and other resources are used up to satisfy these desires when such resources could have been used for others. Of course, given that morality allows for some preferential treatment, the issue is what a morally fair way of dividing these resources is. This point is more urgent given that love is an especially powerful emotion. In RL1, when the passion is at its highest, lovers are famous for their frenzied behavior of neglecting their friends and family members, being distracted at work, losing their appetite, and so on. Thinking that if they cannot have their beloveds their
108 Love world is going to crash, they are liable to do all sorts of things to attain their happiness. Lovers who are in RL2 are not as frantic, but they can lose their heads were they to feel the love is endangered. So there are moral restrictions on love, restrictions that must be especially paid attention to in the face of the strong pull of the desires of love. Love’s tendency to make lovers self-absorbed, pulling them away from others and their moral dues, can only contribute to making the lovers morally worse. This section outlines some of the ways that morality restricts love. These restrictions can be divided into three groups: restrictions on how to act towards the beloved and others, on how one feels towards and thinks about the beloved, and on the bases of or the reasons for the love. Let us start with the ones on action. Restrictions on Actions The restrictions exist in the form of moral obligations to others, including the beloved. Crucial obligations to the beloved include being honest, not harming the beloved, maintaining and promoting his or her proper well-being, keeping whatever (reasonable?) promises were made, being fair to the beloved, helping and supporting the beloved in pursuing his or her goals, making reparations in case the lover wronged the beloved, and having sex with the beloved (when certain conditions are in place). Most of the time fulfi lling these obligations is easy: given the nature of love, lovers are easily inclined to support their beloveds, to make them happy, to not harm them, and so on. Moreover, some of these obligations exist because of the general existence of obligations. The obligation to not harm, for example, is an obligation that each of us has to every other human being (and to animals, in whose case the obligation is violated daily and massively). Others stem from the nature of intimate relationships: the obligation to promote the beloved’s goal is an obligation that parties to intimate relationships have, be they lovers, friends, siblings, or parents and children. Others stem from the nature of the love relationship itself and are not found in other intimate relationships, such as the obligation to have sex. This obligation exists under special conditions: Assuming that the couple is monogamous, assuming the importance of sexual pleasure and release to human beings, and given that relationships almost always start with a strong sexual dimension, lovers have the reasonable expectation that the other will “put out” every so often, and if he or she does not, then, barring some special circumstances (such as that both are indifferent to sex or that they agree to not insist on sex), the other party has every right to dissolve the relationship. Note that this obligation takes on the feel of an obligation when the lovers lose their sexual interest in each other, a phenomenon that eventually happens to most couples. When this happens, either the couple should release each other from the obligation altogether or should not object to the explicit or implicit use of devices to help stimulate sexual desire (fantasy, pornography, role play, etc.). Thus, fulfi lling sexual obligations to each other will not be easy.
Love and Morality 109 Sexual obligations are not the only diffi cult obligations to fulfi ll. Other obligations can be extremely diffi cult to execute. Honesty is one: telling one’s beloved diffi cult truths is never easy, whether those truths have to do with the lover coming clean about his own failures (e.g., being fi red from work, doing something morally shameful, or cheating on the beloved) or with the beloved’s own failures (e.g., “letting himself go,” losing his ambition, or ruining their relationship with his pervasive and irrational anxieties). Just think of the (common) case of cheating and of how this action violates some of the obligations on the above list and makes near-impossible the fulfi llment of the others. Thus, even though love often makes it easy to fulfi ll the obligations lovers have to their beloveds, they can be extremely hard to fulfi ll once the lover commits a serious moral error. The moral restrictions on love also take the form of obligations to others, to family members, friends, colleagues, and strangers—they are the usual obligations that we all have in virtue of the various relationships that we have with others. The issue here is that sometimes the fulfi llment of these obligations is hard given the desires of love, and a proper, moral love ought to heed them. To use the above example of Janet and John: she really wants to spend Sunday evening with John at home, enjoying watching a movie together, but she ought to spend time with her sister who just had to put to sleep her dog of 15 years. This is not to say that Janet feels no sympathy for her sister and spends time with her merely because she has to, but it is to say that her desire to be with John is a strongly competing desire. Or, if John and Janet are involved in a car accident and John is only in mild shock, Janet has an obligation to attend to the injured stranger rather than comfort John, even though she really wants to comfort him. Or, Janet really wants to shelter John from looking bad, but her obligation to be honest is what needs to be heeded: “I’m so sorry; yes, it was John who ran over your cat. Please let us know what we can do to make things better.” Or, to take a tough case, Janet has an obligation to be just, even if at John’s expense: she must not shield John from the law knowing that he has embezzled money from his company. Indeed, in cases where the beloved does something shameful or has a shameful character (e.g., embezzle money, accept a bribe, is racist, kills people, or works in an animal slaughterhouse), lovers often go through some serious mental gymnastics to convince themselves that their beloveds are not as bad as they are (or maybe even are not bad at all). Otherwise, it is hard to see how they can continue to love them ( Jones 2012 ). Finally, lovers have obligations to themselves, which are part and parcel of our general obligations to ourselves. (If you are one of those philosophers who are unhappy with talk of “duties to oneself,” just think of these duties as loose obligations, as things that we owe ourselves, as in, “I owe it to myself to quit smoking,” “I really must start reading the classics of world literature,” or “I really ought to become a vegetarian given the daily horrifi c cruelty to animals.”) For example, there are obligations for self-improvement, including moral self-improvement. If his relationship with Janet is not only not going
110 Love anywhere but is bad for John and is adversely affecting his life, he may have an obligation to himself to abandon ship. He may still love Janet deeply, so acting on this obligation goes against his desire to be with her. Even if his life is not deteriorating, John may still need to leave Janet if his continued love for her means ongoing humiliation and lack of self-respect for himself. Janet may be someone who is simply not worthy of his love and affection, and every minute he spends with her is a minute he pays for in loss of self-respect and dignity. (I shall let the reader give examples of confl ict between duties of selfimprovement and duties to Janet.) Restrictions on Beliefs and Values Restrictions on actions need not exist only when it comes to moral obligations. They might exist to temper the love or to increase it. If Janet realizes that when it comes to John she is always on the ready to heed his desires, she might need to temper this tendency on her part, to force herself to pay more attention to others and to herself, even if no such obligations to others (or to herself) exist. Or, if Janet realizes that she is not expressive enough with John (because, say, she is a quiet and somewhat closed person), and that he often needs to hear more words of affection from her, she might need to get herself to do so more often. Thus, lovers often ought to do certain things even if this “ought” is not one of obligation. Next, there are restrictions on how we feel and think about love and the beloved. In need of moral supervision are love’s beliefs, those beliefs on the basis of which we fall in love and on the basis of which we maintain the love. As we have seen, especially in RL2, x loves y because of y ’s valuable properties. But x ’s beliefs can be false, and x may be mistaken that y has property P on the basis of which x loves y . Thus, love can be morally assessed depending on how the beliefs are arrived at and maintained. Because beliefs prompt us to action, it is important—for pragmatic and, certainly, for moral reasons—to be careful about how we form our beliefs. Even if we don’t act on some of them, we do care about what type of person we are, and we don’t want to be someone who forms beliefs recklessly or who has false beliefs. When two people fall in love, they normally do not know each other very well, and caution about belief formation is crucial. It works in two ways: on the part of the lover forming his or her beliefs about the beloved, and on the part of the beloved saying or doing things that lead the lover to form beliefs about him or her. This does not mean that lovers have to be certain about the truth of their beliefs before acting on them, but they must arrive at them using proper evidence. This is crucial for the following reason: in the usual cases of RL1, sexual attraction plays a big role in enabling two people to fall in love with each other. And when it comes to sexual desire, all bets are off: people are willing to say and believe all sorts of things when under its spell. This might not be a problem if the issue were a one-night stand or just a sexual relationship, but when sexual desire is taking part in creating and cementing a love relationship, proper evidence for belief formation is crucial.
Love and Morality 111 For example, suppose that Kamal and Rani meet each other, and they are attracted to each other and start to seriously think about forming a relationship with each other. If Kamal fi nds out that Rani is a committed vegetarian and an animal rights’ advocate, he ought not to say things that would lead her to mistakenly believe that he shares these values with her, or that he is sympathetic to adopting these values (if he does not share her views). And for her part, Rani should not be quick to believe everything that Kamal says (e.g., “I just need a little push to become a vegetarian, because I really want to be one”). In some cases, such lies are innocuous, and the truth does not undermine future happiness (“So you don’t really like Quentin Tarantino fi lms like I do. Big deal”). But in other cases they are serious, and the example of being a vegetarian is one such case (think of how diffi cult it is to be with someone who eats meat or who does not much care about animal welfare when you strongly do, or think of cases in which you are black and your white beloved thinks that things are just perfect when it comes to race relations in the United States). In such cases, cautious belief-formation is a strong moral responsibility. Why is it important to think of proper belief-formation as a moral responsibility of sorts? First, it is important because, love or no love, people and, in our case, lovers, need to be able to plan their lives and to make decisions, both of which depend on correct information and are undermined by false information. Second, there is a special reason pertaining to love: falling in love is potentially life-changing, and if a relationship is formed on the basis of this falling in love, lovers’ lives deeply change. To discover that the basis of one’s love is a sham is immensely painful, and it can also—depending on the age and duration of the love—undermine one’s entire life. This is certainly true of RL2 but is also true to some extent of RL1: lying to or misleading someone whom you know is interested in you leads him or her to form beliefs, make plans, and rearrange his or her life to accommodate what he or she thinks is a new love. Realizing otherwise is, or could be, crushing, or at the least a major nuisance (cf. Soble 1990 , 284–285). The beliefs in question are not only those that form the start of the love but also those that maintain it. Consider that a crucial aspect of love is concern for the well-being and the happiness of the beloved. But what the well-being and happiness of the beloved are or consist of is not obvious, and the lover needs to make sure that his beliefs about them are, if not true, at least justifi ed (see the discussion in the previous chapter also): that Janet’s well-being does indeed consist of the fact that she should pursue a career in, say, art criticism, and that, say, it will not really make her happy to be a stay-at-home wife. The lover needs to ensure that the well-being being supported or promoted is objective: it is truly the well-being of the beloved, not just what he or she thinks it should be. Because “the objective thriving of the beloved” is, according to Amelie Rorty, the core of love ( 2016 , 343–344), lovers have a moral responsibility to arrive at justifi ed beliefs about what their interests and commitments are, and to arrive at justifi ed beliefs about how they should live well, in order to see whether such interests, commitments, and thriving are compatible with the
112 Love other’s. After all, if John’s interests do not mix well with Janet’s, this would endanger both their happiness and well-being. What makes things especially complicated in the case of love is that lovers often forge and create their individual well-beings, not just their shared wellbeing, in light of the fact that they are with each other ( Rorty 2016 ). In other words, when John and Janet fall in love with each other and they are on their way to starting a relationship, the issue is not simply the confrontation of two well-beings conceived of independently of each other. The issue is, or can be, the creation of a new conception of the well-being for each one given the fact that they are now together. Thus, moral caution enters the picture on all these fronts: thinking of the beloved’s well-being or of one’s own (the lover’s), independently or dependently of the other’s well-being. Morality enters thoughts and feelings in one more crucial way via the values of each lover. Consider the case of Raja who is committed to the welfare of animals, who is a vegetarian and uses few animal products (and only under certain conditions), and who falls in love with Ben who is a dedicated hunter—for whom hunting is a serious sport and a central part of his life. Or consider the case of Ramzi, a Palestinian whose family was originally kicked out of Palestine when the country was converted into a state for Jews, and who falls in love with Leah, who is committed to maintaining Zionism and the Jewishness of Israel (whether over all historic Palestine or just within the 1967 green lines is irrelevant). 6 How is it possible for Raja to accept his love for Ben or for Ramzi to accept his love for Leah? How can they—all of them—truly say that they love each other? How can they maintain their integrity when in love with someone whose values are contradictory to theirs? I am not concerned with who is right in such clashes of values, not because there is no right and wrong values in such cases (there are), but because each side of the love will have the conviction that they are right. The concern is with the clashes themselves and with how lovers can see themselves as moral agents with integrity given their situations. In such cases, morality might call on them to cease and to desist—to take active steps to prevent the emotional (or further emotional) slide into love. Moreover, the cases I have chosen are easy ones. What about when Sarah, a dedicated Democrat, falls in love with Susan, a moderate Republican? Clashes of values do not always have to be stark, but they almost always exist, in more or less subtle ways. In such cases, lovers have their work cut out for them: they must morally navigate their lives with each other so as to maintain and nourish the love without losing their integrity, without giving up on something vital to who they are as moral beings. Moreover, if we leave the subjective side and attend to the objective one— if we ask what morality demands in such cases, period, not what each of the lover and the beloved believes that morality demands, we get interesting results. Let us assume, plausibly, that Raja and Ramzi are in the right. Then morality will demand of them to at the very least be cautious in their love and to proceed only if they can see that their integrity will not be compromised. But morality will demand something else of Ben and Leah. It will demand or, at least, advise, that they proceed with the love and to perhaps allow it to
Love and Morality 113 replace their “values” with real ones—it advises that they open themselves up to proper moral transformation. Readers who balk at these claims because they side with Ben or Leah, or because they think matters are more complex should basically think of these questions in terms of an outside and an inside moral perspective to see how morality’s dictates might differ. Moreover, if there is no right and wrong answer regarding the values espoused by the lovers, what an internal and an external moral perspective would be becomes an interesting question in its own right. Restrictions on the Bases of Love Finally, morality plays a role when it comes to the basis of love, especially with RL2, since it is the form of love that is usually responsive to reasons: Which bases of love refl ect well on the lover and which do not? And on which bases should we maintain the love? For example, if Kamal loves Rani on the basis of her good looks or the fact that she has lots of money, this may tell us that Kamal is shallow or greedy, indicating that he has a morally defective character. If Kamal loves Rani because she is courageous, caring, or just, this refl ects well on him. It is not only moral properties that refl ect well on the lover’s character; the properties could be generally worthwhile ones, such as Rani’s being intelligent, dedicated, ambitious, or patient, as long as Rani does not put these properties to immoral use. This also refl ects morally well on him because it shows he has the wisdom to love someone on the basis of non-shallow or non-fl eeting properties. Loving Rani, however, on the basis of a property important to who she is (e.g., being a skilled gardener) need not refl ect well on Kamal. It will depend on the moral valence of the property in question. With other properties, things are not so clear. If Kamal loves Rani because she is an excellent cook, would this be shallow on his part? Perhaps it would be if it refl ects his sexist views that any woman worth her salt must be able to cook. But what if he himself is a great cook and wants the same quality in his beloved? And what if he is neither a great cook nor sexist, but just happens to be attracted to that property found in Rani? What if Kamal loves Rani because she is astoundingly beautiful or because she is great in bed? We do consider beauty to be a crucial value, even though many would say that Kamal’s love is shallow. Moreover, sex and sexual pleasure are important components of who we are and of successful relationships, yet many would also denigrate Kamal’s love as shallow on their basis. So there are many properties that are hard to qualify as shallow or non-shallow as the basis of love. Context might be crucial: loving y for property P may refl ect badly on x in one context but may not refl ect badly on z in another. Note that someone might fall in love on the basis of a shallow property yet come to love the person later on the basis of a non-shallow property. Kamal might initially love Rani on the basis that she has well-shaped breasts but later come to love her because she is witty, charming, and able to diffuse family confl icts. Does this refl ect well or badly on Kamal? People do usually fall in love based on physical attraction but then love each other for other reasons. If
114 Love falling in love initially on the basis of good looks is enough to indict the lover as shallow, most of us are in deep trouble. Perhaps, then, loving someone on the basis of a shallow property does not refl ect badly on the lover as long as he also loves the beloved on the basis of non-shallow properties. It is crucial to see how these three ways in which morality restricts love are not the same: Kamal might love Rani on the basis that she is intelligent and an excellent chef, yet he still needs to think about how to reconcile her racist beliefs about the superiority of Hindus with his belief that no religious or ethnic group is superior to others. And, of course, he still needs to monitor his actions towards her and towards others given the existence of all sorts of moral obligations that he has. Let us tie together all the points in this section so as to arrive at a more coherent picture. Human beings are generally interested in wanting to lead moral lives—they like to think of themselves as good people who act well and whose lives and projects are morally in the clear, if not also laudable. This does not mean that their characters, actions, and lives are actually good but that human beings aspire to have them be so and like to think of them as being so. This includes love: we want to be with someone we think is good, someone who acts well, and someone whose life is also good; we also want to be someone who is in love with such a person, and we want our love relationship to be moral (people succeed in this to varying degrees depending on the actual content of their character). This means that we want the basis of love to be moral—we want the moral properties on which our love is based to be worthy—and the object of our love—the beloved—to be moral. (This does not mean that the basis of love cannot initially be a non-moral or that the basis cannot continue to partly be non-moral. It means that moral bases of love have to be a part of the overall basis of love for as long as the love endures.) If this is the case—if we want to fall in love on the basis of worthwhile properties, part of which are moral ones, and if we want our beloved to be a good person, then our best bet is to try to meet someone who is virtuous (and for us to be virtuous, too). Only loving someone because he or she is fair, kind, brave, caring, patient, and temperate might have such guarantees, because only virtuous people are able to act morally correctly: they act on their moral obligations, they know what to do in areas of life that do not involve obligations, they know what is worthwhile about life, and they are overall morally responsible—they thus moderate their desires and arrive properly at their beliefs. Aristotle, then, has come back to us with a vengeance: But complete friendship is the friendship of good people similar in virtue; for they wish goods in the same way to each other insofar as they are good, and they are good in their own right. [Hence they wish good to each other for each other’s own sake.] Now those who wish goods to their friend for their friend’s own sake are friends most of all; for they have this attitude because of the friend himself, not coincidentally. Hence these people’s friendship lasts as long as they are good; and virtue is enduring. ( 1999 , 1156b6–1156b14)
Love and Morality 115 It doesn’t matter which conception of virtue we accept (philosophers have offered various conceptions, including the Socratic, Aristotelian, Humean, and Kantian), because any conception will be one of virtue , of moral excellence, and so secures the idea that the love is morally superior. Those who are virtuous and in love will have a moral love. But a moral love is not always an enduring love, because not even virtue can shelter it from the vicissitudes of life and the situations we are thrown into. Consider: I might love Rafael on the basis of his virtues. I might display all the moral wisdom in the world in initiating and maintaining my love for him (and he, too, his love for me). But, alas, my psychological character is such that not even Job’s patience can endure my incessant anxieties. Because of my character, the love goes away. This is just one example of the role that luck plays in love, much as it plays in all aspects of life. Moral loves are rare. Moral and enduring loves are even rarer. Amelie Rorty puts it nicely, “[W]e love widely, but rarely wisely and well” ( 2016 , 352). Summary and Conclusion Romantic love, like other intimate relationships, involves preferential treatment. So long as this treatment does not come at the expense of the lovers’ violation of their duties and decent treatment of others, it is morally permissible, and all the main moral theories concur. They justify its existence on the basis of autonomy. But love has no built-in moral guarantees, and lovers need to monitor their treatment of each other and of others. Those with the virtues might be in the best position to do so. Study Questions 1. Can you think of cases in which someone has an obligation to fall in love with someone else romantically? 2. To what extent can romantic love as an emotion be controlled—cultivated from scratch, strengthened, dampened, killed? How would an answer to this question affect moral claims about love? 3. To what extent does morality sanction preferential treatment? Make sure to distinguish two claims from each other: (1) morality allows some types of preferential treatment (of friends, of family, of beloveds), and (2) morality allows any action in the preferential treatment of members of those types (e.g., does morality allow one to accept a job as a Mafi oso thug because one needs “to put food on the table” for one’s family?). 4. Does it matter to the discussion of the moral theories and how they justify love whether we speak of romantic love in general or whether we speak specifi cally in terms of RL1 and RL2? Why or why not? 5. Does romantic love generally have good effects or bad effects, especially in the long term? Would the answer to this question be different were we to ask it separately about RL1 and RL2?
116 Love 6. Kantians believe in imperfect duties to ourselves, one of which is to morally perfect ourselves and the other is to improve our talent. Might being romantically in love with someone fall under one of these two duties? And in what way or ways would this be an imperfect duty—what is the leeway in this case? 7. Are there any virtues that romantic love goes against or contravenes? Which and why? Are there any vices that romantic love abets or strengthens? Which and why? 8. Would a virtuous person prefer, be indifferent to, or have an aversion to feeling and going through RL1? Would she prefer a “calmer” way of transitioning to RL2? 9. How permissive should morality be when it comes to the preferential treatment of the beloved? Give examples of too much permissiveness and examples of too much restrictiveness to help you see what a reasonable answer might be. 10. Is it possible to romantically love someone, or to stay romantically in love with someone, whom the lover knows is a bad person or does bad things on a regular basis? What sorts of things would lovers have to say to themselves to justify their love and therefore continue to feel it? 11. Give two or three examples of RL1 and RL2 such that the dignity or selfrespect of the lover is compromised by being with the beloved. Would the examples of Raja and Ben, and Ramzi and Leah be suitable were each side to the love to proceed with the love? 12. Go back again to the example of Raja and Ben (or construct your own example as long as it follows the basic recipe of the Raja and Ben example). Suppose that each feels that were he to proceed with the love, his integrity would be compromised. Granted that each would feel this way, would each of their integrities be actually compromised or only one of the two? Why? And how are you understanding integrity in answering this question? 13. Supply a few examples to verify (or falsify) the truth of this claim: loving y for property P may refl ect badly on x in one context, but may not refl ect badly on z in another. Further Reading On morality in general, two fairly easy introductions are Gensler (1998 ) and Rachels (1986 ). Two more involved but highly readable works are Darwall (1998 ) and Kagan (1998 ). On rights, see Campbell (2006 ) and Thomson (1990 ). On partiality, preferential treatment, and special obligations see Blum (1980 ); Graham and LaFollette (1989 ); Jeske (1998 ); and O’Neill and Ruddick (1979 ). A general introduction to the three moral theories is Baron, Pettit, and Slote (1997 ). On utilitarianism and consequentialism, see Darwall (2003 ) and Driver (2012 ). On Kantian ethics, see also Kant (1996a ); Baron (1995 ); Korsgaard (1996 ); Louden (2000 ); Wood (1999 , 2008 ). On virtue ethics, see
Love and Morality 117 Annas (2011 ); Broadie (1991 ); Curzer (2012 ); Foot (2001 ); Hursthouse (1986 , 1999 ); Russell (2013 ); and Swanton (2003 ). On commonsense morality, see Slote (1992 ). On romantic love and virtue, see Martin (1996 ) and Solomon (1991 ). On love and virtue, see Swanton (2003 , ch. 5) and Swanton (2011 ). On morality and belief formation, see Zagzebski (1996 ). On love and sexism, see de Beauvoir (1952 , esp. ch. 23), Firestone (1970 , esp. chs 6 and 7), and Morgan (1991 ). On morality and personal relationships, see LaFollette (1996 ). Notes 1. In this respect, and although the overwhelming majority of people believe that having children is one morally permissible way to conduct one’s life, anti-natalist philosophers (of whom I am one) raise doubts about the morality of having children, given that (1) people suffer; (2) they do so usually to a high degree, and (3) were they to never have existed, no moral loss would have been incurred ( Benatar 2006 ). As far as I can tell, anti-natalism is a sound moral view, though it makes for awkward situations and conversations, especially when friends gleefully announce that they’re pregnant. 2. The issue here is actually more complex, and I devote more space to it in the next chapter. 3. As I mentioned, this criticism of utilitarianism is mistaken. This is mainly because of the consideration I raised above, namely, that it is more productive of good consequences to allow people to live their lives as they see fi t than to micro-manage their lives morally. See Pettit (2003 ). 4. A virtue ethics based on Aristotle’s views accepts a further claim, that having the virtues allows the person to live a characteristically good life. This claim is part of the view of ethical naturalism, which is that, like other animals, human beings have typical or characteristic lives to lead, such that a proper or natural life for a human being is one with a virtuous character, whereas a defective life is one that lacks the virtues. Thus, the claim that the virtues are good for the person who has them (discussed in this chapter) should be distinguished from the claim that the virtues constitute a characteristic human life. See Hursthouse (1999 , esp. ch. 8). 5. Aristotle believed that the virtues are not suffi cient for a good life because we need “external goods”: friends, money, and a dose of good fortune. In this, Aristotle departs from some other Greek philosophers like Socrates and the Stoics who believed that the virtues are both necessary and suffi cient for a good life ( 1999 , Bk. I). 6. An interesting question is whether Raja (or Ramzi) can fall in love with Ben (or Leah) if Raja’s commitment to animal welfare is deep and part of his identity and if he knows about Ben’s hunting commitment in advance. The same question can be asked about Ben and Leah.
4 Is Love a Moral Emotion? Outline of the Chapter This chapter starts by examining recent attempts by some philosophers to show that romantic love is a moral emotion. I argue that they all fail. I then argue that there is a way to show that romantic love is a moral emotion, but that it is a weak or limited way. The chapter ends with a discussion about whether it is prudent to have romantic love in our lives. Preliminaries In the previous chapter, we looked at some connections between romantic love and morality, but the overall strategy of the chapter was, for lack of a better term, defensive: how love is permitted or justifi ed on some moral theories as long as certain restrictions are in place. It is like having a house guest: morality says, “I will allow love into my home as long as it abides by certain rules.” However, recently a few philosophers have attempted to argue that love in itself is a moral phenomenon or emotion. The general idea behind this claim is that romantic love is in itself a positive moral force—it is inherently a morally good thing. Of course, how this is to be explained depends on the particular view or theory that claims it. So in this chapter we will examine some of these attempts, and I will argue that all fail. In addition to deriving important lessons from these failures, I will locate one way in which romantic love is a moral emotion, but I will argue that this way is very limited, in that romantic love is not unique in this respect, in that only RL2 is like this, not RL1, and in that the morality of love is too narrow in its focus on the beloved. Before we proceed, note that love can be a moral emotion in one (or more) of three ways. First, it can be a moral emotion in that it is based on moral reasons. Second, it can be a moral emotion in that it targets morally good people—the object of love is morally good. Third, it can be a moral emotion in the way it is conducted by the lovers. Note also that I will use “emotion” in the expression “love is a moral emotion” as a generic way of referring to romantic love without being committed to its being an emotion; the discussion does not hinge on whether it really is an emotion, a set of desires, an attitude, or something else altogether.
Is Love a Moral Emotion? 119 Romantic Love as a Moral Emotion Romantic love might be thought to be a moral emotion because: (1) it is impartial (Velleman 1999); (2) it is anti-egotistical, taking the lover out of his world and into the world of the beloved ( Jollimore 2011 ); (3) it is based on, or its reasons are, the beloved’s ethical character traits ( Abramson & Leite 2011 ); (4) it is a necessary ingredient in a well-lived life ( Milligan 2011 ; Frankfurt 2004 ); and (5) it makes us want to be better people (popular opinion, joined by Phaedrus in Plato’s Symposium ). 1 In discussing the above ways, I explain the shortcomings of each while also teasing out its truth (in those approaches that do contain truths). I then argue in what ways romantic love is a moral emotion. Love as a Response to Rationality In a much cited article, the philosopher J. David Velleman (1999) argues that love is a moral emotion because it is a response to our rationality. His view is specifi cally concerned with Kantian ethics and love because the former has been (mistakenly) viewed as generally hostile to the latter, given its requirements of universality or (to put it very roughly) that everyone be treated equally. Velleman aims to show that love is a moral emotion because it is a response to others’ practical rationality, much like, in Kantian ethics, our moral behavior is prompted by others’ rationality. Velleman targets romantic love in his discussion, especially RL2, and similar forms of love. He writes, “When I say that love is a moral emotion, what I have in mind is the love between close adult friends and relations—including spouses and other life-partners, insofar as their love has outgrown the effects of overvaluation and transference” (1999, 351). He thus includes parent-child love, sibling love, friendship love, and romantic love. If his (unclear) reference to the effects of overvaluation and transference refer to the early stages of romantic love—to RL1—then his discussion excludes it. After arguing that to Kant respect for the moral law is really respect for the rational will, Velleman argues that most philosophers who have discussed love as a set of desires have erred in analyzing love in terms of an aim, because it implies that the beloved is an instrument towards that aim. His point is that it is a mistake to think essentially of love as, say, desiring to benefi t the beloved. This might be an aspect of love, but it does not capture its core. Instead, “I venture to suggest that love is an attitude toward the beloved himself but not toward any result at all” (1999, 354). This refl ects the Kantian idea of persons as ends in themselves. When x acts for the sake of y without acting for the sake of fulfi lling y ’s wishes or desires, it is y himself that is the object of x ’s action. In this sense, people are self-existent ends (1999, 356–359). The above applies to love. Velleman states, “I am inclined to say that love is likewise the awareness of a value inhering in its object; and I am also inclined to describe love as an arresting awareness of that value” (1999, 360). He adds,
120 Love “Love does not feel (to me, at least) like an urge or impulse or inclination toward anything; it feels rather like a state of attentive suspension, similar to wonder or amazement or awe” (1999, 360). Love arrests our “emotional tendencies for emotional self-protection from another person.” Love makes us vulnerable to another (1999, 361). Love is not a set of desires to promote the happiness of the beloved or to be with the beloved. Instead, it is a response and an openness to the rationality of the beloved. Indeed, a person becomes a beloved when the lover is awed by the soon-to-be-beloved’s rationality. On Velleman’s view, love is impartial because the value of a self-existing end, dignity, does not serve as grounds for comparison with something else, but as grounds for respect or reverence. When the object of love is a person, we love him by way of response to his value as a self-existing end, in virtue of being a person (1999, 365), which is a trait had by every person. “I fi nd it plausible to say that 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” (1999, 365). Note that to Velleman when we respond to another’s rational nature we need not respond (only) to her intellect, but more generally to a capacity of appreciation or valuation, to a “person’s core of refl ective concern” (1999, 366). How are we to square this view with the idea that in love the beloved is unique or special? Velleman claims that being loved on the basis of our personhood or dignity is to be loved as special. Because no individual is interchangeable with another, “everyone can be singularly valuable, or special. The specialness of each person is a value of the kind that attaches to ends in themselves, which are to be appreciated as they are in themselves rather than measured against alternatives” (1999, 370). Moreover, just because x loves y by responding to y ’s value, it does not follow that the “immediate object of love is the purely intelligible aspect of the beloved . . . The immediate object of love, I would say, is the manifest person, embodied in fl esh and blood and accessible to the senses” (1999, 371). X loves y because of y ’s specifi c traits (e.g., the way y walks or smokes) as a response to the traits being an expression, symbol, or reminder of y ’s value (1999, 371). Indeed, according to Velleman, when people want to be loved for their traits, they actually want to be loved for these traits as an expression of their inner value (1999, 371–372). Thus, love on Velleman’s view is a moral emotion because it is a response to people’s rational nature (broadly understood). Indeed, it is a moral emotion with a vengeance, because in being a response to rational nature it silences the accusation that love is partial. Velleman’s view is unconvincing, however. First, Velleman does not succeed in defending the notion of being special that is unique to love. It is true that everyone is special because we are not interchangeable with each other, given our individual rationality. But this is not the sense of “special” or “uniqueness” that is found in the discourse about love. That notion agrees or accepts that we are all special because of our rationality but goes on to insist on a special specialness for love. Insofar as we want to preserve this notion of specialness
Is Love a Moral Emotion? 121 (and we might not want to, given our previous discussion), Velleman’s account does not accommodate it, and so fails in that respect. Second, because love targets people on the basis of rational nature, Velleman’s view does away with any exclusivity in love. This is because z could be as much x ’s object of love as y is, given that each has a rational nature worthy of x ’s awe. This implication raises the fi rst serious challenge to Velleman’s view. Let’s ask why it is that x loves y and not z . After all, z ’s traits are as much an expression of z ’s rational nature as are y ’s of y ’s rational nature. Velleman provides two explanations. He claims that, fi rst, z ’s traits might not “speak to” x at all or as well as y ’s. Second, we have limits (psychological and emotional, I assume) on how many people we can love (1999, 372). However, these answers are unconvincing because they provide a causal explanation as to why x loves y and not z , whereas we need a normative one. As Kolodny stresses, while Velleman’s answer succeeds in explaining how x psychologically comes to love y and not z , it fails to explain why loving y , but not loving z , is an appropriate response: “What are we to say about a parent who just happens . . . to see an expression of rational nature in his child’s classmates, but not in his own child? Ought we to say that this is inappropriate?” ( 2003 , 177). On this second criticism, Velleman’s view faces a dilemma: either it cannot provide an adequate normative account of why some, but not others, are the object of x ’s love, or it can but then it would be plausible only as an account of a type of love, for example, universal or agapic love. But neither Velleman nor we are interested in defending this type of love as moral; the one we should defend as moral is romantic love and similar emotions. Of course, any view of love that admits of reasons faces a similar objection, as we have seen: If x loves y for y ’s intelligence, how are we to justify x ’s not loving z , who is as, if not more, intelligent than y ? Thus the charge against Velleman’s view might be thought unfair. However, the strategy that philosophers have used to ward off this objection by arguing that the reasons for love are really the relationship itself or the historical particularities of the beloved is not available to Velleman. This is because his view admits of no restrictions on the reasons for love, so it is different in this respect from other reason-based views of love. Third, Velleman’s view is implausible at its core. In criticizing the view of love-as-desire, Velleman claims that it does not cohere with how love phenomenologically works. He says this, from what I can gather, for two reasons. First, he gives cases of love in which the lover has no desire to be with the beloved and in which the lover even has the desire to not be—cannot stand to be—with the beloved (1999, 353). Second, he claims that when x loves y , x is not usually fi lled with the urge to help y or promote y ’s interests at the thought of y : “At the thought of a close friend, my heart doesn’t fi ll with an urge to do something for him, though indeed it may fi ll with love” (1999, 353). Velleman, however, never fl eshes out the fi rst type of case. How can someone love someone else and yet “cannot stand to be with” him or her? This leaves us wondering, rightly, what sort of love this is that x has for y but that leaves x cold, if not in deep freeze, at the thought of being with y . The two
122 Love types of case that fi t Velleman’s “coldness” are those in which x is physically attracted to y but cannot stand y otherwise, and that in which x cares for y but also cannot stand y otherwise. Yet neither seems to be a case of love: x can be sexually attracted to y without loving y , and x can care for y also without loving y . Velleman, then, owes us an explanation of what he has in mind. Moreover, Velleman’s second reason neglects the idea of dispositional desires, making it sound as if x ’s desire to be with y must manifest itself at any moment that x thinks of y , an idea that no thoughtful defender of love-asdesire would claim. On the view of love as involving certain crucial desires, if x loves y , then x desires y ’s good, but this need not mean that the minute x thinks of y , x desires to do something to help y ( x might be busy at work). That Velleman’s discussion of this view is uncharitable is further seen in his use of “urge” instead of “desire,” which makes it sound as if x ’s love for y borders on psychosis: “Someone whose love was a bundle of these urges, to care and share and please and impress—such a lover would be an interfering, ingratiating nightmare” (1999, 353). The irony is that while Velleman claims that the love-as-desire view fails on phenomenological grounds, his own view fares worse on these grounds. When we love someone we do not feel arrested or amazed or in awe—certainly not, frequently, usually, or even sometimes, certainly not by their rational nature, and certainly not on fi rst encounter. Perhaps we feel this on rare occasions, but then this would not make for a proper characterization of love in general. This is especially true given that Velleman seems to exclude RL1 from his discussion. After all, it is usually starry-eyed lovers who are amazed or awed by their beloveds, though they are probably affected by the beloved’s tight-looking ass or shapely breasts, not his or her rational nature. 2 After a few years of being together, it is hard to maintain this amazement and awe (at least sometimes it is true that familiarity breeds contempt). It is also hard to see how sibling love succumbs to such awe (siblings sometimes barely maintain working relationships with each other, let alone like or love each other). Friends might be awed or amazed by each other, yet this also seems to be rare, with “liking” being more the norm. Parents are often awed by what their children do (“Mona just said ‘Mama’!”), which might very well be because of the children’s budding rational nature. Yet even here this lasts for only so long. Thus, if we are to reject the love-as-desire view on phenomenological grounds, we have a much stronger reason to reject Velleman’s view on the same grounds. Indeed, when it comes specifi cally to romantic love, we have powerful reasons to doubt its Vellemanian characterization. In its early passionate stages, romantic love is notorious for the fact that many people not only fall in love on the fl imsiest of reasons but they often do so by convincing themselves that y is something that y is actually not. Why they do this probably has many explanations (the power of sexual desire, loneliness, the desire to feel wanted and loved, etc.), but they do. Their reasons might be noble ( x thinks y a genius), but they are often false. This makes RL1 in its fi rst phase uniquely un suited for a view such as Velleman’s. But to exclude RL1 is to exclude a very common and
Is Love a Moral Emotion? 123 appealing form of love. So the view would have failed to show why that form of love is moral, which is an unacceptable omission for a theory that aims to capture the morality of love. Might a Velleman- like view succeed? It would be a view that shows love to be a moral emotion by arguing that it is a response to a shared moral trait (e.g., dignity, rational nature, autonomy, second-order volitions, and being made in God’s image). But any such view would face the same objections above. It would, fi rst, face the same dilemma that Velleman’s view faces. Either it cannot justify why x loves y but not z , or it can but ends up justifying x ’s love for everybody else. Second, it would face the objection that, on phenomenological grounds, people just don’t seem to fall in love with each other based on such traits as human rationality or dignity. Thus, a Velleman-like view seems to not capture in what ways personal love is a moral emotion. Love as Defeating Egoism The philosopher Troy Jollimore argues that that personal love is a moral emotion because it allows the agent to overcome his egoism ( 2011 ). He targets romantic love and friendship (2011, xiii), though much of his discussion focuses on the former. To Jollimore, love is a moral emotion ( 2011 , 146) because it takes us out of our egoism: “[L]ove relationships take us out of ourselves, freeing ourselves from excessive self-concern and narcissism. Love helps us grasp the full force of the obvious but elusive fact that the world is larger than ourselves, that other people are just as real as we are” ( 2011 , 149). 3 He gives as an example a passage from a novel by John Banville in which the narrator tells us how central his personal love is to his life, even more so than his children and parents ( 2011 , 150). Jollimore adds, “Like morality, love calls the agent out of herself and demands that she focus her attention on the needs, interests, desires, and well-being of other people, rather than on her self-interest” ( 2011 , 150). The attention of the lover on the beloved is moral “insofar as it both enables and takes as its goal the full, unrestricted recognition of a human individual” ( 2011 , 150). Indeed, to Jollimore, love is the “ideal ethical relationship” because only love allows us to truly know and empathize with someone; we cannot truly empathize with strangers and their suffering, “for as long as he remains a stranger he represents at best an abstract representation of humanity in my eyes” ( 2011 , 151). Unlike Velleman, who tries to argue that love is impartial, Jollimore argues that since love is both moral and partial, morality is sometimes partial: “[T]here are ways of seeing that are moral and yet, at the same time, deeply partial” ( 2011 , 155). To Jollimore, “To love a person is to treat him as an end in himself and to fully recognize his existence as an individual. It is to take his needs and concerns as one’s own, to regard him charitably and justly, and to place him at the center of one’s life. All of this speaks to the fact that love is a deeply moral emotion” ( 2011 , 168). The beloved is so much a center of the lover’s life that
124 Love when he or she enters the room the lover’s attention just goes to him or her ( 2011 , 4). Jollimore titles his book Love’s Vision because love is a way of seeing someone. Love not only “alters one’s way of seeing but . . . love is , in large part, a way of seeing—a way of seeing one’s beloved, and also a way of seeing the world” ( 2011 , 4). Love, however, is specifi cally a moral way of seeing “insofar as it is an attempt to recognize a person in her full individuality and involves a kind of generous attention” ( 2011 , 26). The vision view of love is, however, also epistemic in that love involves the tendency (found in all instances of love) to view the beloved “in the best possible light, to see her fl aws but interpret them in a way that renders them insignifi cant or irrelevant (and perhaps manages to see them as not genuine fl aws at all), the tendency . . . to see the beloved with ‘a friendly eye’” ( 2011 , 47). The two ways of seeing are connected: it is because love involves a generous and charitable way of seeing someone that love is able to recognize that person in his or her full individuality. Without seeing the beloved with a friendly eye, the beloved would not be able to stand out from among the human crowd and thus would not be treated in her full individuality ( 2011 , 88). It is also a matter of seeing someone in his or her full humanity, not just individuality: love is “a way of fully recognizing the value of an individual person, of recognizing her importance in a world that contains so many individuals that the importance of a single one is distressingly easy to lose sight of” ( 2011 , 90). This is why, to Jollimore, love is important: to be loved is to be placed at the center of another’s world: it is to “have one’s reality and individuality truly and fully acknowledged” ( 2011 , 89). Jollimore’s overarching argument seems to be as follows: when x loves y , x sees y fully in two interrelated ways: as a person with all the value with which people are endowed (this is similar to Velleman’s view), and as an individual with specifi c attributes, including those undetected or seen as defective by others, in a generous and charitable way (here Jollimore denies the existence of any gap between a person’s inner self and her attributes, claiming that this is contra Velleman’s view [2011, 144]). Seeing y in this epistemically full way, x puts y at the center of x ’s universe, which allows x to exit x ’s egotistical tendencies and to immerse himself in y ’s world. Thus, love is a moral emotion. Setting aside exaggerations such as that love “helps us grasp the full force of the obvious but elusive fact that the world is larger than ourselves, that other people are just as real as we are,” epistemic challenges that only die-hard solipsists face, Jollimore’s claim that love is the “ideal ethical relationship” is problematic since it relies on the idea that only love allows us to empathize with another. First, empathy is not always a good moral guide or standard, precisely insofar as it requires intimate knowledge of the recipient of our moral attention, which requires time and focus, thereby excluding many other people. It is one thing to claim that empathy is a moral criterion, but quite another to claim that it is the one criterion. Moreover, even as a moral criterion, empathy is morally dangerous, as we ought not to empathize with just anybody, because
Is Love a Moral Emotion? 125 it might warp our moral judgment as to how we ought to treat the person (do not confuse empathy with sympathy). This is true not only in cases in which the other person is evil but also in cases in which empathizing with another person does not allow us to have the needed emotional or cognitive distance to either fi gure out, or act on, what is right. It is also false that without empathy strangers remain to us abstract representations of humanity (whatever this means), which Jollimore claims, as it is obvious that we are able to feel a range of emotions towards strangers, such as compassion, sympathy, pity, generosity, and, yes, even empathy. Empathy does not seem special in this regard, nor does x need to love y to be able to empathize with y . Thus, insofar as Jollimore’s claim that love’s morality consists in taking us out of our egoistical tendency relies on empathy and its moral powers, the argument requires more work. Second, there is the issue of how low we are willing to set the bar for what suffi ces as moral. Is something’s taking us out of our egoism suffi cient for that thing to be moral? If yes, how much of a victory is it? There are questions here about why personal love takes us out of our egoism. A few philosophers (e.g., Kierkegaard, as we have seen) suspect that some sort of selfi shness or self-interestedness is at work. Suppose that x loves y because, say, y makes x happy. Then even though x is taken out of x ’s own world, this is only because of ultimately selfi sh or self-centered concerns (because love is egotistical!). The egoism of romantic love is especially worrisome in RL1 when x ’s seeming benevolent behavior towards y is often motivated by x ’s desires to secure y ’s love. The point is not that personal love is selfi sh or self-interested (indeed, I have argued earlier that RL2 is not), but that these are not issues to be neglected; they need to be addressed to secure the truth that personal love is genuinely anti-egotistical. We need to ask why personal love immerses x in y ’s world. If personal love were indeed selfi sh (or self-interested in morally dubious ways), then its purported anti-egoism would not be suffi cient to make it a moral emotion. However, I submit that there is truth to the anti-egotistical view of love’s morality. If we set aside RL1, in which x ’s concern for y seems to be selfi shly motivated, in RL2 x ’s concern for y is robust; that is, it is motivated by y ’s own welfare. Even if y ’s doing well redounds to x in some fashion (it is very hard, e.g., for x to be happy if y is not), this does not show that x ’s motive is x ’s own happiness. Phenomenologically speaking, when x acts for the sake of y , x ’s concern is genuine and not selfi sh. It is then plausible that RL2 is a moral emotion in that it enables x to have robust concern for someone else, even though this someone happens to be x ’s beloved. I shall have a bit more to say about this, but for now let’s assume that romantic love is moral in this way. There remains the question of how morally far this view goes. Jollimore’s remarks on this issue imply that we jump from the fi re into the frying pan: romantic love takes one out of one’s own egoism only to fully immerse one in the self of another. This provides little moral comfort, since whether I focus on myself or someone else’s self might be too narrow to be genuinely moral. What
126 Love Jollimore says about this is actually chilling. The passage from the Banville novel that he quotes begins to show us the problem, namely, that if the beloved is so much the center of the narrator’s world, even more so than the narrator’s own children and parents, one wonders what kind of morality it is that Jollimore attributes to romantic love. It sounds more like obsession than the genuine concern and regard for others that morality minimally requires of us. More chilling are Jollimore’s remarks on the Drowning Wife Case, famously and originally given by Bernard Williams (1981 ), in which a husband has to choose between saving his drowning wife or a stranger. Williams’s point about this case is that if the husband thinks to himself that he should save his wife because she is his wife, then he has “one thought too many,” the idea being that the husband should not even have to go through any mental process of justifying why he should save his wife and not the stranger. In his version of the case, Jollimore names the drowning wife “Andrea,” the drowning stranger “Daniel,” and Andrea’s husband “Sam.” Sam, who is a good swimmer, is married to and very much loves Andrea. Sam, of course, can only rescue one. He rescues Andrea, an action that seems to be sanctioned by morality. Jollimore claims that we expect Sam to silence all considerations other than those regarding Andrea—that it is necessary that he “perceive this consideration as possessing such overwhelming importance that it simply drives everything else from his mind . If the danger to Andrea does not strike him with this sort of force and practical import, then his love for her is shallow or not entirely genuine” ( 2011 , 35). This sounds terrible. It is one thing to say that Sam should be motivated by the thought that his wife is drowning, but quite another that this thought should silence all others. The danger here is that even if love takes us out of self-absorption, it throws us into the absorption in another, and this does not sound moral. If genuine love really does this, then its clash with morality is evident, and securing the claim that romantic love is a moral emotion on such anti-egotistical grounds would be very tenuous. Consider also the following post-rescue conversation between Andrea and Sam: Andrea : “You never gave one thought to the fact that that man over there was also drowning?” Sam : “No dear. Not one thought. I love you!” Andrea (to herself): “Wow! I am beginning to wonder what kind of man I married.” What should we say to Andrea about her thinking this? Should we say to her, “Consider yourself lucky to have such a loving husband! I wish my husband thought only of me the last time I was drowning!”? Or should we say to her: “It’s a good thing that at least one of you has a lingering moral sense”? Since the second option is perfectly reasonable, Jollimore’s handling of the case is at best shaky. Although we do not want Sam to be ruminating about what morality requires before he rescues Andrea, we also don’t want him to be oblivious
Is Love a Moral Emotion? 127 to the needs of the stranger. We want him to have some moral sensitivity for and attention to others, and if romantic love, to be “genuine,” must silence such considerations, then it is not a moral emotion. It might be moral only in the sense that it is anti-egotistical, but this does not make it a moral emotion in any deep or interesting way. Jollimore does modify his claims by saying that we do not expect Sam to be blind to the danger facing Daniel, and that Sam does notice that Daniel is in danger, but that if “it does explicitly cross his mind, it will not strike him with the sort of compelling urgency with which the fact that Andrea is in danger will strike him.” Sam might also be aware that Daniel’s danger is a reason for other people to help Daniel, but “if he genuinely loves Andrea, this fact will not be one that he regards as especially important, certainly not important enough to cause him to suspend his efforts on behalf of Andrea” ( 2011 , 35). Even though this alteration sounds more reasonable in terms of not making romantic love too anti-moral, we are not out of the woods yet. Daniel’s being in danger does cross Sam’s mind, true, but it has no pull on him: Sam does not feel that he is the one to have to save him. But why should we not want to say that if Sam were a decent person, he would feel the pull of Daniel’s being in danger? It is quite reasonable to say that Sam should feel some sort of psychic anguish about not being able to help Daniel. If romantic love prevents this, then once again it seems to clash with morality. Moreover, Jollimore says nothing about whether Sam should feel, after the rescue, remorse or guilt at not having saved Daniel. Even if Sam does not feel the pull of Daniel’s being in danger, we might expect him to later feel bad about not having rescued Daniel or even not having felt the pull. Jollimore’s romantic love silences not only Daniel-related thoughts prior to and during rescuing Andrea, but also post-rescue. If this is the effect of love, its moral danger is once again evident. Jollimore’s handling of the Drowning Wife Case is instructive as far as the partiality of romantic love is concerned and as far as what it means to say that love takes us out of egotistical concerns and into concerns for the beloved. It indicates how immersion in another is not actually a straightforward path to moral behavior, motivation, and feeling. Love’s being moral will depend to a large extent on how we fl esh out the lover’s concerns for the beloved and the lover’s concerns for others, thus reinforcing the claims of the last chapter about the special importance of heeding our obligations to others when in love. To address this point, let’s ask whether we can generalize a bit from the discussion of Jollimore’s views. After all, someone might object, “There is still a case to be made for romantic love as a moral emotion because of its anti-egoism. It is just that Jollimore’s is not its best defense.” In what follows, I assume that when x acts out of concern for y , x ’s concern is robust. Thus, love is a moral emotion in this way. The issue is how far this takes us, since egoism and anti-egoism are not the only morally relevant factors. I want to claim that it does not take us far. If immersion in myself were egotistical and thereby not moral, why would immersion in someone else suddenly make
128 Love my actions and motives moral? It cannot simply be that the other person is not myself, because being moral has much to do with how the agent treats, thinks, and feels about other people (and animals), such that “other people” is not reducible to one person. One cannot get off the moral hook by making the case that one is completely devoted to the needs and concerns of one other person (unless, perhaps, it’s a special case, e.g., attending to someone with terminal illness). We would admire the agent’s dedication and devotion to that person, but we would (or should) still have qualms about the agent’s moral character. Thus, I contend that what is morally problematic about egoism is not only that the agent is absorbed with himself, but also that he does so to the exclusion of others. That is, if one problem with egoism, as I want to say, might not be so much self -absorption as it is absorption in one person to the exclusion of others, then claiming that romantic love is moral simply because it is antiegoistical won’t suffi ce, because it would not address the exclusionary aspect of love. It is not enough for romantic love to be moral that it takes us out of ourselves; it must also not be the kind of emotion or attitude that excludes others from our moral concern. Thus, romantic love’s anti-egoism says little, on its own, about love’s morality. Thus, any attempt that, like Jollimore’s, focuses simply on love’s anti-egoism will fail. Of course, we can avoid some of the pitfalls of Jollimore’s specifi c approach by not characterizing romantic love in such a way that it excludes moral concern for others. After the early stages of love are over, the settled stage enters, during which others are not usually excluded. That is, in RL2 x might not be so obsessed with y that x is unable to devote time, energy, attention, and so on, to others. Lovers resume the normalcy of their lives, part of which is moral attention to others. However, this is a general claim, and the extent to which romantic love excludes others, whether in the early or later stages, depends on individual cases. If x is like the narrator of the Banville novel quoted by Jollimore, or is like Sam, or, more generally, fi ts Jollimore’s characterization of what a lover is, then we should lose much hope for x ’s moral character. Thus, we can claim that romantic love is moral in the sense that x shows robust concern for y and y ’s well-being. But, fi rst, this way of being moral is too narrow in its focus on one person. And, second, depending on the case, x ’s concern might be solely for y , if, say, x is like the narrator of Banville’s novel. In such cases, romantic love is not much of a moral emotion. For the claim that love is a moral emotion to have depth, it must mean two things: x ’s personal love for y is such that (1) its concern for y is robust; and (2) it does not hinder x from balancing, in the morally right ways (to be cashed out), x ’s concern for y with x ’s concern for others (as we have seen in the last chapter). However, (2) shows that romantic love is not so much a moral emotion as it is not an obstacle to morality; after all, it is not the love for y that does the balancing, but x ’s moral decency. Put differently: romantic love’s morality consists in its not being an obstacle to the lover doing what needs to be morally done. This really leaves us with (1) to embody love’s morality, which is, as we have seen, very narrow.
Is Love a Moral Emotion? 129 Love as Based on Moral Properties I now address another attempt, by Kate Abramson and Adam Leite (2011 ), to show that romantic love, especially RL2, is a moral emotion. 4 According to them, love is a response to “particular sorts of morally signifi cant character traits such as generosity and interpersonal warmth, forthrightness and sincerity, compassion, considerateness, steadfastness and loyalty” ( 2011 , 674). Lovers often highlight each other’s moral qualities, and they often break up with each other because of moral qualities (e.g., “He’s a jerk”). This is so because love is “centrally” a “reaction to perceived morally signifi cant traits of the love-object” ( 2011 , 674). Abramson and Leite focus on “reactive” love: “There is a variety of love that is, in paradigm or central cases, an affectionate attachment to another person, (a) appropriately felt as a non-self-interested response to particular kinds of morally laudable features of character expressed by the loved one in interaction with the lover (and others the lover loves), and (b) paradigmatically manifested in certain kinds of acts of goodwill and characteristic affective, desiderative and other motivational responses (including other-regarding concern and a desire to be with the beloved).” Reactive love is typical of friendship and romantic love, and is different from parent-child love ( 2011 , 677). To better understand their view, consider the list of examples that Abramson and Leite give of possible grounds for x ’s love for y . X loves y because (1) of y ’s “stalwart kindness and loyalty, courageous thoughtfulness, the captivating way he tells a story, and the expression in his eyes”; (2) y repaired x ’s car, brought x fl owers, and took “the kids to their grandparents last weekend” so that x could rest; (3) y gave x a big diamond necklace; (4) y has “shiny hair and fl awless complexion”; and (5) y “has size 10 feet” (2011, 678). They claim that (5) is diffi cult to understand “in a way that makes it intelligible as a basis for love,” but agree that it can be made intelligible, adding that it, along with (3) and (4), are not proper bases of love, as they are “misplaced, inappropriate, superfi cial, immature, disturbed, or perverse” ( 2011 , 678). 5 However, (1) is entirely appropriate as a basis for love, and so is (2), especially if y ’s acts are not out of character ( 2011 , 678). Thus, according to Abramson and Leite, reactive love “is paradigmatically grounded in features of the beloved’s character, rather than in particular actions or anything even less connected with ‘who the person is.’ Indeed, the proper grounds of reactive love are a subset of praiseworthy traits—those laudable traits that are especially salient in the context of fairly intimate relationships” ( 2011 , 679). Can seemingly non-moral features to which love responds, such as sexual attractiveness, aesthetic features, and cultural commonalities, be the basis of love, according to Abramson and Leite (2011 , 685)? First, they argue, plausibly, that some of these features are moral: “An alluring walk or fl irtatious speech can be manifestations of good character when appropriately deployed in the context of a developing romantic relationship, where of course an appropriate expression of love is sexual activity” ( 2011 , 685). Second, traits that
130 Love seem non-moral can actually be moral in the context of reactive love; they give the example of two friends who play music together: the way the friends react to each other (e.g., being considerate in giving each other space for soloing, delighting in their shared musical jokes, etc.) are not just aesthetic, but are also “broadly moral.” They add, “Once such morally signifi cant elements are factored out, what is left over are not good reasons for love” ( 2011 , 686). X could indeed love y on the basis of their shared liking of Twilight and Lady Gaga, but “taken at face value, those are not good reasons to love” ( 2011 , 686). 6 However, they agree that such superfi cial factors do have an important role to play in developing love, with their absence being problematic for love. The idea seems to be that although x ’s loving y on the basis of, say, y ’s sexual attractiveness is not a good reason for love, the absence of the sexual attraction is an obstacle, if not a downright killer, of the developing relationship between x and y ( 2011 , 686–687). We might be able to put the point that good reasons for love operate in RL2, and non-good reasons for love operate in RL1, at least insofar as RL1 is a phase leading to RL2. On such a view, personal love is a moral emotion in that its bases or reasons are moral: x loves y because of y ’s moral traits. We have discussed this view in the previous chapter but in a narrower way, as the idea that loving someone on the basis of moral properties is a way to ensure that one’s love is moral in this way, not to argue that this is what makes love, as such, a moral emotion. Still, the view falls short of its target. 7 First, if the Abramson-Leite view were correct, we should expect to see more loves being based on moral properties, but this does not seem to be true. As the philosopher Arina Pismenny puts it, “[T]here seems to be no correlation between instances of love and a person’s moral goodness. All sorts of people are loved” ( 2016 ). Abramson and Leite could respond by claiming that people love on the basis of what they perceive to be moral qualities of the beloved, even though these qualities are not really moral. But such a reply does not help them, as it robs their view from its basic claim, which is that love is based on real, not merely perceived, moral properties of the beloved. Second, love, and romantic love especially, often responds to non-moral reasons, maybe even immoral ones. It is clear that what Abramson and Leite are really after is not an account of love in general, but of proper love. For although they agree that giving a diamond necklace, having shiny hair, liking Lady Gaga, or even having size 10 feet, are all intelligible reasons for love (to varying degrees), they go on to discuss the moral appropriateness of these bases. Thus, theirs is a specifi c view of love, of morally apt love. This means that this type of view does not translate well into a general view of romantic love’s morality. This is especially true of RL1, in which lovers fall in love with each other on the fl imsiest of reasons, especially sexual attraction. Indeed, this is why many cases of RL1 neither last nor usher in RL2. Lovers’ reasons cannot sustain the love and x discovers that y really has no good properties on the basis of which to love y . Yet even in RL2, what justifi es the love are not only moral properties, but many non-moral ones. This point
Is Love a Moral Emotion? 131 is crucial because the non-moral reasons for love form a large class, one that includes more than superfi cial reasons. There are cases in which x loves y on the basis of non-superfi cial yet also non-moral qualities (they are at least not obviously moral). X ’s loving y for y ’s love of collecting stamps is not a superfi cial reason, yet it is also not a moral one. X ’s loving y for y ’s calming effect on x is also not a superfi cial reason, yet whether it is moral is hard to establish, even on a broad construal of “moral.” So even though one might argue that the traits for which y is loved and which we initially thought were, say, only aesthetic or athletic are actually not only so, this does not mean that all such traits are moral in the context of love and, when they are, the sense in which they are requires careful unpacking. In addition, and as I have argued in Chapter 1 the history between the lovers is the reason for the type of commitment found in RL2. Yet the history between the lovers, which is a common basis for many a love, is not, as such, a moral property. A view such as Abramson and Leite’s needs to accommodate this type of basis of love. even though the history is not, as such, a moral property. There is one more point that an account such as Abramson and Leite’s needs to address, which is how to handle the extremely common cases in which x loves y on the basis of moral properties but such that y also has serious immoral properties. Why would this love be moral? For example, suppose that José loves Kim because of Kim’s generosity towards and care of her family and friends, because of Kim’s affection and tenderness towards their children, and because of Kim’s dedication to the local pet shelter. These are the reasons for or the bases of José’s love for Kim. But suppose that Kim is a deeply racist person, someone who believes that, say, brown people are inherently not as intelligent as white people, and that Muslims are backward people and will always be so because of their religion. What are we to say of the morality of José’s love for Kim? Granted that its bases are moral in that they are based on some of Kim’s moral properties, it seems to nonetheless overlook, tolerate, or even accept immoral ones. The problem for such a view of the morality of love is that precisely because it locates the morality of love in its reasons, it needs to explain how the love is good when its reasons are moral but in a selective way. It is not clear to me how such an account would accommodate such cases, and both the lover and the beloved are deeply implicated in the moral defects of the love. Thus, a view that claims romantic love to be moral because of its bases must contend with cases in which the bases are not moral and must carefully unpack the notion of “moral” in those cases when they are not clearly so. It thus cannot claim that romantic love is itself moral. Love as Necessary for a Good Life Another view fi nds romantic love to be a moral emotion because it is necessary for a good, well-lived, or fl ourishing life (I use these three interchangeably). I specifi cally discuss Tony Milligan’s view in his book Love ( 2011 ), whose
132 Love focus is romantic love. Note that in this discussion “romantic love” refers not to the emotion as such but to the relationship based on the emotion, because this is usually what is meant by the claim that love is necessary for the good life; it’s not merely experiencing the emotion, but experiencing it as part of a relationship with the beloved. Moreover, these relationships are generally happy, successful cases of love relationships; otherwise, the claim that love is necessary for a good life won’t even get off the ground, for it is hard to see how someone’s life is made good in having a failed loved relationship. 8 One of the main claims that Milligan makes is that we need to love and be loved if we are to live a good life. Milligan takes the idea that we need to love and be loved as a datum, and he uses it to justify why love is indispensable to a good life, by which he means that love is one necessary ingredient among others. He gives two reasons. First, he writes, “[L]ove helps to motivate us and to give our lives shape and direction . . . When we love someone, especially in a sexualized manner , we want to secure their love and we want our happiness and their happiness to result from our doing so . . . In the absence of love, if there was nothing and no one that we cared for, we would be frequently directionless and habitually bored” ( 2011 , 40–41; my emphasis). This is the familiar claim that love provides direction and meaning to our lives. After quickly (and, I believe, unfairly) dispatching other motivations (e.g., sympathy and compassion) that might give life shape and direction in lieu of love ( 2011 , 41–42), Milligan concludes, “Given the pervasiveness of love, the way it works its way unseen into so much of what we do, and the way it provides a major reason why we do it, there may be a diffi culty in specifying any other emotion or any combination of emotions that could play exactly the same role” ( 2011 , 43). This (fi rst) reason for the claim that love is indispensable to a good life is plausible if it is about love in general, not romantic love specifi cally. Indeed, Milligan quotes and discusses Harry Frankfurt’s views in support of his own, even though the former are about love in general, not romantic love as such (which, incidentally, Frankfurt claims is a poor paradigm of love [ 2004 , 43]). Milligan (in the quotation above) also starts by emphasizing sexualized love in giving life direction but concludes that love in general, not just romantic love, does so. It is surely plausible to claim that we need to love certain things or people to have a good life. This is because caring about and for other people or projects provides life with meaning, and love seems to include a crucial component of care. Here we have to avoid the trap of shifting the focus from love to care in supporting the claim that love gives life direction and meaning (loving y implies caring for or about y , but caring for or about y does not entail loving y ). 9 Milligan might be right that no other emotion can play “exactly” the same role as love (if for no reason other than that “exactly” makes his claim trivially true), but it is clear that non-romantic forms of love can do so. Obviously, parents’ love of children has provided meaning for billions of lives. People’s love of their work often structures their lives and gives them meaning. Love of animals is the fulcrum around which many people’s lives revolve. Friendship love
Is Love a Moral Emotion? 133 is trickier, as it is often thought of not as a project or a structural goal around which people’s lives revolve, but as an adornment of life or an ingredient of a good life. Still, we can easily see how it is in some cases: friendship can give direction, focus, and meaning to people stuck in unhappy jobs or marriages, and whose few pleasures in life include spending time with their friends. Thus, people could, and do, lead meaningful and fully directed lives without romantic love. This is especially true of RL1: it is hard to see how an emotion that not everyone experiences (though many long to), and that, for those who do experience it, does not last long, can give meaning and direction to our lives. Now one might object that meaning and direction are not the same thing, and that even though RL1 might not give direction to someone’s life, it can surely give it meaning. This sounds true. But the notion of “meaning” at work in a view like Milligan’s is not short-term—it is not feeling for a few months that things make sense, that there is something to live for. The notion of “meaning” is long-term: it is being with someone that the lover knows is there to stay, and around which the lover can structure his or her life. Thus, although RL1 can provide someone’s life with some purpose, it is not the kind of meaning that structures a life. So the claim that romantic love gives structure and meaning to life is probably true of RL2, and even here, it is true of some lives but not others, given that these other lives can be structured around caring or loving attachments that do not involve romantic love. Thus, romantic love is not necessary for a good life. According to Milligan, the second reason for love’s indispensability is that the experience of being loved is crucial to our sense of self-worth, and it is sexual love that is “the most effective way in which we are shown our own value and worth” ( 2011 , 46). This is because we are able to see ourselves in a “better light” owing to the fact that we realize that we are worthy of someone else’s love: “When we believe that someone is in love with us we may say, ‘This person, who could have settled upon any number of others, many of whom have a great deal more going for them, happens to love me. They have a single life to lead and they want to spend it with me rather than anyone else’” ( 2011 , 46). This is important because this willingness of y to want to spend y ’s life with x shows that y regards x as someone who is “ worth spending a life with” ( 2011 , 47). Let’s grant that having a sense of self-worth is important for a good life. Yet surely we want our sense of self-worth to be anchored in a true and proper estimation of who we are. We prefer a life containing a sense of self-worth based on truth to one with a sense of self-worth based on falsehood. That is, we want to have self-worth not merely to experience the feeling of having this worth, but because of what it indicates: our self-worth. Milligan is aware of this: “we need to see ourselves as loveable or worthy of being loved in order to appreciate our own value, and that such an appreciation of our value or worth is a deep requirement for human contentment” ( 2011 , 49–50). The emphasized expressions indicate that what is at stake is a genuine sense of self-worth. But this means that not just any source of the sense of self-worth will do. The trustworthiness of the source is essential. Thus, that y wants to spend y ’s life
134 Love with x does not show that x has genuine self-worth, only that y considers x to be worthy of this life-spending. But surely it makes a difference whether y ’s belief is trustworthy. If y were, for example, desperate to be with someone, a “loser,” lacks standards, “has no life,” or not very smart, why would y ’s judgment be important to x ’s sense of self-worth? Why should y ’s desire to spend y ’s life with x mean anything to x ? If anything, given y ’s worthless attributes, y ’s desire to spend y ’s life with x should lower x ’s sense of self-worth. Milligan agrees with this: “There is, after all, little joy to be found in being loved by someone whose judgement is notoriously askew” ( 2011 , 47). There is surely truth in the idea that if someone is generally trustworthy, especially as far as her insight into people’s characters is concerned, then being chosen by her to be her life-partner is affi rming for the chosen one. Unfortunately, Milligan does not anchor the aptness of the sense of self-worth in y ’s trustworthiness, but in the mere fact of love: “When the person who loves us is no stranger or acquaintance of doubtful insight but is rather someone we love, it gives their affections a standing and authority that they would otherwise lack” ( 2011 , 47). The danger here is obvious: x ’s simply loving y is no guarantee that y ’s judgment of x is accurate. The problem raised in the previous paragraph is not going to be avoided simply because x loves y back, because y is not going to become any less of a loser because of that! This would be a case of the blind leading the blind, as the saying has it (and no offense to blind people). Indeed, because love has the capacity to obfuscate things, we have an additional reason to worry about the veracity of its judgments. Thus, just because y loves and knows x , this would not make y ’s judgment about the worthiness of x any more veridical than were y to be a stranger or an acquaintance. RL1 provides especially fertile ground for cases of bad judgments. Its passions are notorious for making us see our beloveds in an exaggerated light. We judge them, think of them, and feel for them differently when in their grip than we would when not in their grip. With RL2, we have no reason to suspect bad judgment on the part of the lovers owing to the blinding power of love’s passion, but in order for x ’s sense of self-worth to be apt, y needs to love x for the right reasons—reasons that imply x ’s worthiness to be loved. This means that what matters is not only that y loves x , but also why y does so and who y is, including y ’s values, y ’s ability to make proper judgments, and, in general, how well y ’s life is going. Thus, simply knowing that x and y love each other tells us nothing about the aptness of their sense of self-worth. Three more points are worth discussing. First, despite the above shortcoming, is romantic love the most effective way of attaining a proper sense of self-worth, as Milligan claims? There is no reason to doubt the judgment of friends—certainly no reason stronger than the one that might arise about the judgment of beloveds. If the judgments of our friends can be askew, so can be those of beloveds. If the judgments of beloveds can be veridical, so can those of friends. The point is that it seems perfectly reasonable to claim that we derive a sense of self-worth from our friends. If this can happen, romantic love is not special in this regard.
Is Love a Moral Emotion? 135 Second, there are many sources of our sense of self-worth, including familial relations, work, friendship, and personal goals. This makes it hard to see why not having a sense of self-worth from one area of our lives affects the quality of life so much as to make it not good. If x has a properly anchored sense of self-worth in all, most, or many areas of x ’s life, yet x has no romantic love or has it but it is a disaster, there is no good reason to claim that x ’s life is not good. Yet this is precisely what we would have to claim if we agree that romantic love is indispensable to a good life. Now, it is true that people who experience failed love relationships or whose love lives are a disaster tend to feel themselves a failure, even though other areas of their lives are going well. However, while this might be a psychological fact about many people, it does not show that they are right to feel this way. Cultural infl uence may be playing a bad role here: because of cultural pressure to have someone in your life, failing to attain this goal engenders in people a (false) sense of failure. Third, if Milligan is correct that loving and being loved are human needs (and he is surely correct if the claim is about love in general, not just romantic love), this would indeed show that love is necessary for a good life, but only because we need it to survive. If love is a genuine need, then we cannot survive (or survive in healthy ways) without it. But this would make love necessary for a good life only trivially. It would be like saying that breathing is indispensable to a good life. There are many things that we need to survive and that are therefore necessary for a good life. The interesting claim to make instead is how something that is not needed for survival is still needed for a good life . Because romantic love is clearly not necessary for human survival, the interesting issue is whether it is necessary for a good life. If Milligan’s view is correct, we should be able to say to x , “Yes, you can survive without romantic love, but if you want to live a good life you need it.” Milligan has not shown this. Because it is evident that life can be quite good—successful, happy, anxietyand depression-free, pleasurable, and so on—without the presence of romantic love in it, it is doubtful that romantic love is indispensable to the good life. A life without some form of intimacy is indeed a bad life—human beings, like many other social animals, require some forms of intimacy to fl ourish. But the sources of the intimacy are many: friendship, parental love, and sibling care, for example. Even the diluted intimacy of acquaintances and colleagues might do the trick. After all, there are people who enjoy their generally solitary life, and who derive just what they need from infrequent albeit regular contact with co-workers, acquaintances, and social-events friends. Romantic love can of course be a crucial source of intimacy, and if it exists in someone’s life, it might very well make life good. But it is not necessary for a good life. Some readers might object that it is easy to criticize the claim that romantic love is necessary for a good life because it is patently false, but that if we construe the claim in a more plausible way, it might not be easy to criticize, which indicates that it is true or onto something. Thus, the claim might be more convincingly construed as that romantic love makes life better : romantic