philosophical essay love

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This essay focuses on personal love, or the love of particular persons as such. Part of the philosophical task in understanding personal love is to distinguish the various kinds of personal love. For example, the way in which I love my wife is seemingly very different from the way I love my mother, my child, and my friend. This task has typically proceeded hand-in-hand with philosophical analyses of these kinds of personal love, analyses that in part respond to various puzzles about love. Can love be justified? If so, how? What is the value of personal love? What impact does love have on the autonomy of both the lover and the beloved?

1. Preliminary Distinctions

2. love as union, 3. love as robust concern, 4.1 love as appraisal of value, 4.2 love as bestowal of value, 4.3 an intermediate position, 5.1 love as emotion proper, 5.2 love as emotion complex, 6. the value and justification of love, other internet resources, related entries.

In ordinary conversations, we often say things like the following:

• I love chocolate (or skiing).
• I love doing philosophy (or being a father).
• I love my dog (or cat).
• I love my wife (or mother or child or friend).

However, what is meant by ‘love’ differs from case to case. (1) may be understood as meaning merely that I like this thing or activity very much. In (2) the implication is typically that I find engaging in a certain activity or being a certain kind of person to be a part of my identity and so what makes my life worth living; I might just as well say that I value these. By contrast, (3) and (4) seem to indicate a mode of concern that cannot be neatly assimilated to anything else. Thus, we might understand the sort of love at issue in (4) to be, roughly, a matter of caring about another person as the person she is, for her own sake. (Accordingly, (3) may be understood as a kind of deficient mode of the sort of love we typically reserve for persons.) Philosophical accounts of love have focused primarily on the sort of personal love at issue in (4); such personal love will be the focus here (though see Frankfurt (1999) and Jaworska & Wonderly (2017) for attempts to provide a more general account that applies to non-persons as well).

Even within personal love, philosophers from the ancient Greeks on have traditionally distinguished three notions that can properly be called “love”: eros , agape , and philia . It will be useful to distinguish these three and say something about how contemporary discussions typically blur these distinctions (sometimes intentionally so) or use them for other purposes.

‘ Eros ’ originally meant love in the sense of a kind of passionate desire for an object, typically sexual passion (Liddell et al., 1940). Nygren (1953a,b) describes eros as the “‘love of desire,’ or acquisitive love” and therefore as egocentric (1953b, p. 89). Soble (1989b, 1990) similarly describes eros as “selfish” and as a response to the merits of the beloved—especially the beloved’s goodness or beauty. What is evident in Soble’s description of eros is a shift away from the sexual: to love something in the “erosic” sense (to use the term Soble coins) is to love it in a way that, by being responsive to its merits, is dependent on reasons. Such an understanding of eros is encouraged by Plato’s discussion in the Symposium , in which Socrates understands sexual desire to be a deficient response to physical beauty in particular, a response which ought to be developed into a response to the beauty of a person’s soul and, ultimately, into a response to the form, Beauty.

Soble’s intent in understanding eros to be a reason-dependent sort of love is to articulate a sharp contrast with agape , a sort of love that does not respond to the value of its object. ‘ Agape ’ has come, primarily through the Christian tradition, to mean the sort of love God has for us persons, as well as our love for God and, by extension, of our love for each other—a kind of brotherly love. In the paradigm case of God’s love for us, agape is “spontaneous and unmotivated,” revealing not that we merit that love but that God’s nature is love (Nygren 1953b, p. 85). Rather than responding to antecedent value in its object, agape instead is supposed to create value in its object and therefore to initiate our fellowship with God (pp. 87–88). Consequently, Badhwar (2003, p. 58) characterizes agape as “independent of the loved individual’s fundamental characteristics as the particular person she is”; and Soble (1990, p. 5) infers that agape , in contrast to eros , is therefore not reason dependent but is rationally “incomprehensible,” admitting at best of causal or historical explanations. [ 1 ]

Finally, ‘ philia ’ originally meant a kind of affectionate regard or friendly feeling towards not just one’s friends but also possibly towards family members, business partners, and one’s country at large (Liddell et al., 1940; Cooper, 1977). Like eros , philia is generally (but not universally) understood to be responsive to (good) qualities in one’s beloved. This similarity between eros and philia has led Thomas (1987) to wonder whether the only difference between romantic love and friendship is the sexual involvement of the former—and whether that is adequate to account for the real differences we experience. The distinction between eros and philia becomes harder to draw with Soble’s attempt to diminish the importance of the sexual in eros (1990).

Maintaining the distinctions among eros , agape , and philia becomes even more difficult when faced with contemporary theories of love (including romantic love) and friendship. For, as discussed below, some theories of romantic love understand it along the lines of the agape tradition as creating value in the beloved (cf. Section 4.2 ), and other accounts of romantic love treat sexual activity as merely the expression of what otherwise looks very much like friendship.

Given the focus here on personal love, Christian conceptions of God’s love for persons (and vice versa ) will be omitted, and the distinction between eros and philia will be blurred—as it typically is in contemporary accounts. Instead, the focus here will be on these contemporary understandings of love, including romantic love, understood as an attitude we take towards other persons. [ 2 ]

In providing an account of love, philosophical analyses must be careful to distinguish love from other positive attitudes we take towards persons, such as liking. Intuitively, love differs from such attitudes as liking in terms of its “depth,” and the problem is to elucidate the kind of “depth” we intuitively find love to have. Some analyses do this in part by providing thin conceptions of what liking amounts to. Thus, Singer (1991) and Brown (1987) understand liking to be a matter of desiring, an attitude that at best involves its object having only instrumental (and not intrinsic) value. Yet this seems inadequate: surely there are attitudes towards persons intermediate between having a desire with a person as its object and loving the person. I can care about a person for her own sake and not merely instrumentally, and yet such caring does not on its own amount to (non-deficiently) loving her, for it seems I can care about my dog in exactly the same way, a kind of caring which is insufficiently personal for love.

It is more common to distinguish loving from liking via the intuition that the “depth” of love is to be explained in terms of a notion of identification: to love someone is somehow to identify yourself with him, whereas no such notion of identification is involved in liking. As Nussbaum puts it, “The choice between one potential love and another can feel, and be, like a choice of a way of life, a decision to dedicate oneself to these values rather than these” (1990, p. 328); liking clearly does not have this sort of “depth” (see also Helm 2010; Bagley 2015). Whether love involves some kind of identification, and if so exactly how to understand such identification, is a central bone of contention among the various analyses of love. In particular, Whiting (2013) argues that the appeal to a notion of identification distorts our understanding of the sort of motivation love can provide, for taken literally it implies that love motivates through self -interest rather than through the beloved’s interests. Thus, Whiting argues, central to love is the possibility that love takes the lover “outside herself”, potentially forgetting herself in being moved directly by the interests of the beloved. (Of course, we need not take the notion of identification literally in this way: in identifying with one’s beloved, one might have a concern for one’s beloved that is analogous to one’s concern for oneself; see Helm 2010.)

Another common way to distinguish love from other personal attitudes is in terms of a distinctive kind of evaluation, which itself can account for love’s “depth.” Again, whether love essentially involves a distinctive kind of evaluation, and if so how to make sense of that evaluation, is hotly disputed. Closely related to questions of evaluation are questions of justification: can we justify loving or continuing to love a particular person, and if so, how? For those who think the justification of love is possible, it is common to understand such justification in terms of evaluation, and the answers here affect various accounts’ attempts to make sense of the kind of constancy or commitment love seems to involve, as well as the sense in which love is directed at particular individuals.

In what follows, theories of love are tentatively and hesitantly classified into four types: love as union, love as robust concern, love as valuing, and love as an emotion. It should be clear, however, that particular theories classified under one type sometimes also include, without contradiction, ideas central to other types. The types identified here overlap to some extent, and in some cases classifying particular theories may involve excessive pigeonholing. (Such cases are noted below.) Part of the classificatory problem is that many accounts of love are quasi-reductionistic, understanding love in terms of notions like affection, evaluation, attachment, etc., which themselves never get analyzed. Even when these accounts eschew explicitly reductionistic language, very often little attempt is made to show how one such “aspect” of love is conceptually connected to others. As a result, there is no clear and obvious way to classify particular theories, let alone identify what the relevant classes should be.

The union view claims that love consists in the formation of (or the desire to form) some significant kind of union, a “we.” A central task for union theorists, therefore, is to spell out just what such a “we” comes to—whether it is literally a new entity in the world somehow composed of the lover and the beloved, or whether it is merely metaphorical. Variants of this view perhaps go back to Aristotle (cf. Sherman 1993) and can also be found in Montaigne ([E]) and Hegel (1997); contemporary proponents include Solomon (1981, 1988), Scruton (1986), Nozick (1989), Fisher (1990), and Delaney (1996).

Scruton, writing in particular about romantic love, claims that love exists “just so soon as reciprocity becomes community: that is, just so soon as all distinction between my interests and your interests is overcome” (1986, p. 230). The idea is that the union is a union of concern, so that when I act out of that concern it is not for my sake alone or for your sake alone but for our sake. Fisher (1990) holds a similar, but somewhat more moderate view, claiming that love is a partial fusion of the lovers’ cares, concerns, emotional responses, and actions. What is striking about both Scruton and Fisher is the claim that love requires the actual union of the lovers’ concerns, for it thus becomes clear that they conceive of love not so much as an attitude we take towards another but as a relationship: the distinction between your interests and mine genuinely disappears only when we together come to have shared cares, concerns, etc., and my merely having a certain attitude towards you is not enough for love. This provides content to the notion of a “we” as the (metaphorical?) subject of these shared cares and concerns, and as that for whose sake we act.

Solomon (1988) offers a union view as well, though one that tries “to make new sense out of ‘love’ through a literal rather than metaphoric sense of the ‘fusion’ of two souls” (p. 24, cf. Solomon 1981; however, it is unclear exactly what he means by a “soul” here and so how love can be a “literal” fusion of two souls). What Solomon has in mind is the way in which, through love, the lovers redefine their identities as persons in terms of the relationship: “Love is the concentration and the intensive focus of mutual definition on a single individual, subjecting virtually every personal aspect of one’s self to this process” (1988, p. 197). The result is that lovers come to share the interests, roles, virtues, and so on that constitute what formerly was two individual identities but now has become a shared identity, and they do so in part by each allowing the other to play an important role in defining his own identity.

Nozick (1989) offers a union view that differs from those of Scruton, Fisher, and Solomon in that Nozick thinks that what is necessary for love is merely the desire to form a “we,” together with the desire that your beloved reciprocates. Nonetheless, he claims that this “we” is “a new entity in the world…created by a new web of relationships between [the lovers] which makes them no longer separate” (p. 70). In spelling out this web of relationships, Nozick appeals to the lovers “pooling” not only their well-beings, in the sense that the well-being of each is tied up with that of the other, but also their autonomy, in that “each transfers some previous rights to make certain decisions unilaterally into a joint pool” (p. 71). In addition, Nozick claims, the lovers each acquire a new identity as a part of the “we,” a new identity constituted by their (a) wanting to be perceived publicly as a couple, (b) their attending to their pooled well-being, and (c) their accepting a “certain kind of division of labor” (p. 72):

A person in a we might find himself coming across something interesting to read yet leaving it for the other person, not because he himself would not be interested in it but because the other would be more interested, and one of them reading it is sufficient for it to be registered by the wider identity now shared, the we . [ 3 ]

Opponents of the union view have seized on claims like this as excessive: union theorists, they claim, take too literally the ontological commitments of this notion of a “we.” This leads to two specific criticisms of the union view. The first is that union views do away with individual autonomy. Autonomy, it seems, involves a kind of independence on the part of the autonomous agent, such that she is in control over not only what she does but also who she is, as this is constituted by her interests, values, concerns, etc. However, union views, by doing away with a clear distinction between your interests and mine, thereby undermine this sort of independence and so undermine the autonomy of the lovers. If autonomy is a part of the individual’s good, then, on the union view, love is to this extent bad; so much the worse for the union view (Singer 1994; Soble 1997). Moreover, Singer (1994) argues that a necessary part of having your beloved be the object of your love is respect for your beloved as the particular person she is, and this requires respecting her autonomy.

Union theorists have responded to this objection in several ways. Nozick (1989) seems to think of a loss of autonomy in love as a desirable feature of the sort of union lovers can achieve. Fisher (1990), somewhat more reluctantly, claims that the loss of autonomy in love is an acceptable consequence of love. Yet without further argument these claims seem like mere bullet biting. Solomon (1988, pp. 64ff) describes this “tension” between union and autonomy as “the paradox of love.” However, this a view that Soble (1997) derides: merely to call it a paradox, as Solomon does, is not to face up to the problem.

The second criticism involves a substantive view concerning love. Part of what it is to love someone, these opponents say, is to have concern for him for his sake. However, union views make such concern unintelligible and eliminate the possibility of both selfishness and self-sacrifice, for by doing away with the distinction between my interests and your interests they have in effect turned your interests into mine and vice versa (Soble 1997; see also Blum 1980, 1993). Some advocates of union views see this as a point in their favor: we need to explain how it is I can have concern for people other than myself, and the union view apparently does this by understanding your interests to be part of my own. And Delaney, responding to an apparent tension between our desire to be loved unselfishly (for fear of otherwise being exploited) and our desire to be loved for reasons (which presumably are attractive to our lover and hence have a kind of selfish basis), says (1996, p. 346):

Given my view that the romantic ideal is primarily characterized by a desire to achieve a profound consolidation of needs and interests through the formation of a we , I do not think a little selfishness of the sort described should pose a worry to either party.

The objection, however, lies precisely in this attempt to explain my concern for my beloved egoistically. As Whiting (1991, p. 10) puts it, such an attempt “strikes me as unnecessary and potentially objectionable colonization”: in love, I ought to be concerned with my beloved for her sake, and not because I somehow get something out of it. (This can be true whether my concern with my beloved is merely instrumental to my good or whether it is partly constitutive of my good.)

Although Whiting’s and Soble’s criticisms here succeed against the more radical advocates of the union view, they in part fail to acknowledge the kernel of truth to be gleaned from the idea of union. Whiting’s way of formulating the second objection in terms of an unnecessary egoism in part points to a way out: we persons are in part social creatures, and love is one profound mode of that sociality. Indeed, part of the point of union accounts is to make sense of this social dimension: to make sense of a way in which we can sometimes identify ourselves with others not merely in becoming interdependent with them (as Singer 1994, p. 165, suggests, understanding ‘interdependence’ to be a kind of reciprocal benevolence and respect) but rather in making who we are as persons be constituted in part by those we love (cf., e.g., Rorty 1986/1993; Nussbaum 1990).

Along these lines, Friedman (1998), taking her inspiration in part from Delaney (1996), argues that we should understand the sort of union at issue in love to be a kind of federation of selves:

On the federation model, a third unified entity is constituted by the interaction of the lovers, one which involves the lovers acting in concert across a range of conditions and for a range of purposes. This concerted action, however, does not erase the existence of the two lovers as separable and separate agents with continuing possibilities for the exercise of their own respective agencies. [p. 165]

Given that on this view the lovers do not give up their individual identities, there is no principled reason why the union view cannot make sense of the lover’s concern for her beloved for his sake. [ 4 ] Moreover, Friedman argues, once we construe union as federation, we can see that autonomy is not a zero-sum game; rather, love can both directly enhance the autonomy of each and promote the growth of various skills, like realistic and critical self-evaluation, that foster autonomy.

Nonetheless, this federation model is not without its problems—problems that affect other versions of the union view as well. For if the federation (or the “we”, as on Nozick’s view) is understood as a third entity, we need a clearer account than has been given of its ontological status and how it comes to be. Relevant here is the literature on shared intention and plural subjects. Gilbert (1989, 1996, 2000) has argued that we should take quite seriously the existence of a plural subject as an entity over and above its constituent members. Others, such as Tuomela (1984, 1995), Searle (1990), and Bratman (1999) are more cautious, treating such talk of “us” having an intention as metaphorical.

As this criticism of the union view indicates, many find caring about your beloved for her sake to be a part of what it is to love her. The robust concern view of love takes this to be the central and defining feature of love (cf. Taylor 1976; Newton-Smith 1989; Soble 1990, 1997; LaFollette 1996; Frankfurt 1999; White 2001). As Taylor puts it:

To summarize: if x loves y then x wants to benefit and be with y etc., and he has these wants (or at least some of them) because he believes y has some determinate characteristics ψ in virtue of which he thinks it worth while to benefit and be with y . He regards satisfaction of these wants as an end and not as a means towards some other end. [p. 157]

In conceiving of my love for you as constituted by my concern for you for your sake, the robust concern view rejects the idea, central to the union view, that love is to be understood in terms of the (literal or metaphorical) creation of a “we”: I am the one who has this concern for you, though it is nonetheless disinterested and so not egoistic insofar as it is for your sake rather than for my own. [ 5 ]

At the heart of the robust concern view is the idea that love “is neither affective nor cognitive. It is volitional” (Frankfurt 1999, p. 129; see also Martin 2015). Frankfurt continues:

That a person cares about or that he loves something has less to do with how things make him feel, or with his opinions about them, than with the more or less stable motivational structures that shape his preferences and that guide and limit his conduct.

This account analyzes caring about someone for her sake as a matter of being motivated in certain ways, in part as a response to what happens to one’s beloved. Of course, to understand love in terms of desires is not to leave other emotional responses out in the cold, for these emotions should be understood as consequences of desires. Thus, just as I can be emotionally crushed when one of my strong desires is disappointed, so too I can be emotionally crushed when things similarly go badly for my beloved. In this way Frankfurt (1999) tacitly, and White (2001) more explicitly, acknowledge the way in which my caring for my beloved for her sake results in my identity being transformed through her influence insofar as I become vulnerable to things that happen to her.

Not all robust concern theorists seem to accept this line, however; in particular, Taylor (1976) and Soble (1990) seem to have a strongly individualistic conception of persons that prevents my identity being bound up with my beloved in this sort of way, a kind of view that may seem to undermine the intuitive “depth” that love seems to have. (For more on this point, see Rorty 1986/1993.) In the middle is Stump (2006), who follows Aquinas in understanding love to involve not only the desire for your beloved’s well-being but also a desire for a certain kind of relationship with your beloved—as a parent or spouse or sibling or priest or friend, for example—a relationship within which you share yourself with and connect yourself to your beloved. [ 6 ]

One source of worry about the robust concern view is that it involves too passive an understanding of one’s beloved (Ebels-Duggan 2008). The thought is that on the robust concern view the lover merely tries to discover what the beloved’s well-being consists in and then acts to promote that, potentially by thwarting the beloved’s own efforts when the lover thinks those efforts would harm her well-being. This, however, would be disrespectful and demeaning, not the sort of attitude that love is. What robust concern views seem to miss, Ebels-Duggan suggests, is the way love involves interacting agents, each with a capacity for autonomy the recognition and engagement with which is an essential part of love. In response, advocates of the robust concern view might point out that promoting someone’s well-being normally requires promoting her autonomy (though they may maintain that this need not always be true: that paternalism towards a beloved can sometimes be justified and appropriate as an expression of one’s love). Moreover, we might plausibly think, it is only through the exercise of one’s autonomy that one can define one’s own well-being as a person, so that a lover’s failure to respect the beloved’s autonomy would be a failure to promote her well-being and therefore not an expression of love, contrary to what Ebels-Duggan suggests. Consequently, it might seem, robust concern views can counter this objection by offering an enriched conception of what it is to be a person and so of the well-being of persons.

Another source of worry is that the robust concern view offers too thin a conception of love. By emphasizing robust concern, this view understands other features we think characteristic of love, such as one’s emotional responsiveness to one’s beloved, to be the effects of that concern rather than constituents of it. Thus Velleman (1999) argues that robust concern views, by understanding love merely as a matter of aiming at a particular end (viz., the welfare of one’s beloved), understand love to be merely conative. However, he claims, love can have nothing to do with desires, offering as a counterexample the possibility of loving a troublemaking relation whom you do not want to be with, whose well being you do not want to promote, etc. Similarly, Badhwar (2003) argues that such a “teleological” view of love makes it mysterious how “we can continue to love someone long after death has taken him beyond harm or benefit” (p. 46). Moreover Badhwar argues, if love is essentially a desire, then it implies that we lack something; yet love does not imply this and, indeed, can be felt most strongly at times when we feel our lives most complete and lacking in nothing. Consequently, Velleman and Badhwar conclude, love need not involve any desire or concern for the well-being of one’s beloved.

This conclusion, however, seems too hasty, for such examples can be accommodated within the robust concern view. Thus, the concern for your relative in Velleman’s example can be understood to be present but swamped by other, more powerful desires to avoid him. Indeed, keeping the idea that you want to some degree to benefit him, an idea Velleman rejects, seems to be essential to understanding the conceptual tension between loving someone and not wanting to help him, a tension Velleman does not fully acknowledge. Similarly, continued love for someone who has died can be understood on the robust concern view as parasitic on the former love you had for him when he was still alive: your desires to benefit him get transformed, through your subsequent understanding of the impossibility of doing so, into wishes. [ 7 ] Finally, the idea of concern for your beloved’s well-being need not imply the idea that you lack something, for such concern can be understood in terms of the disposition to be vigilant for occasions when you can come to his aid and consequently to have the relevant occurrent desires. All of this seems fully compatible with the robust concern view.

One might also question whether Velleman and Badhwar make proper use of their examples of loving your meddlesome relation or someone who has died. For although we can understand these as genuine cases of love, they are nonetheless deficient cases and ought therefore be understood as parasitic on the standard cases. Readily to accommodate such deficient cases of love into a philosophical analysis as being on a par with paradigm cases, and to do so without some special justification, is dubious.

Nonetheless, the robust concern view as it stands does not seem properly able to account for the intuitive “depth” of love and so does not seem properly to distinguish loving from liking. Although, as noted above, the robust concern view can begin to make some sense of the way in which the lover’s identity is altered by the beloved, it understands this only an effect of love, and not as a central part of what love consists in.

This vague thought is nicely developed by Wonderly (2017), who emphasizes that in addition to the sort of disinterested concern for another that is central to robust-concern accounts of love, an essential part of at least romantic love is the idea that in loving someone I must find them to be not merely important for their own sake but also important to me . Wonderly (2017) fleshes out what this “importance to me” involves in terms of the idea of attachment (developed in Wonderly 2016) that she argues can make sense of the intimacy and depth of love from within what remains fundamentally a robust-concern account. [ 8 ]

4. Love as Valuing

A third kind of view of love understands love to be a distinctive mode of valuing a person. As the distinction between eros and agape in Section 1 indicates, there are at least two ways to construe this in terms of whether the lover values the beloved because she is valuable, or whether the beloved comes to be valuable to the lover as a result of her loving him. The former view, which understands the lover as appraising the value of the beloved in loving him, is the topic of Section 4.1 , whereas the latter view, which understands her as bestowing value on him, will be discussed in Section 4.2 .

Velleman (1999, 2008) offers an appraisal view of love, understanding love to be fundamentally a matter of acknowledging and responding in a distinctive way to the value of the beloved. (For a very different appraisal view of love, see Kolodny 2003.) Understanding this more fully requires understanding both the kind of value of the beloved to which one responds and the distinctive kind of response to such value that love is. Nonetheless, it should be clear that what makes an account be an appraisal view of love is not the mere fact that love is understood to involve appraisal; many other accounts do so, and it is typical of robust concern accounts, for example (cf. the quote from Taylor above , Section 3 ). Rather, appraisal views are distinctive in understanding love to consist in that appraisal.

In articulating the kind of value love involves, Velleman, following Kant, distinguishes dignity from price. To have a price , as the economic metaphor suggests, is to have a value that can be compared to the value of other things with prices, such that it is intelligible to exchange without loss items of the same value. By contrast, to have dignity is to have a value such that comparisons of relative value become meaningless. Material goods are normally understood to have prices, but we persons have dignity: no substitution of one person for another can preserve exactly the same value, for something of incomparable worth would be lost (and gained) in such a substitution.

On this Kantian view, our dignity as persons consists in our rational nature: our capacity both to be actuated by reasons that we autonomously provide ourselves in setting our own ends and to respond appropriately to the intrinsic values we discover in the world. Consequently, one important way in which we exercise our rational natures is to respond with respect to the dignity of other persons (a dignity that consists in part in their capacity for respect): respect just is the required minimal response to the dignity of persons. What makes a response to a person be that of respect, Velleman claims, still following Kant, is that it “arrests our self-love” and thereby prevents us from treating him as a means to our ends (p. 360).

Given this, Velleman claims that love is similarly a response to the dignity of persons, and as such it is the dignity of the object of our love that justifies that love. However, love and respect are different kinds of responses to the same value. For love arrests not our self-love but rather

our tendencies toward emotional self-protection from another person, tendencies to draw ourselves in and close ourselves off from being affected by him. Love disarms our emotional defenses; it makes us vulnerable to the other. [1999, p. 361]

This means that the concern, attraction, sympathy, etc. that we normally associate with love are not constituents of love but are rather its normal effects, and love can remain without them (as in the case of the love for a meddlesome relative one cannot stand being around). Moreover, this provides Velleman with a clear account of the intuitive “depth” of love: it is essentially a response to persons as such, and to say that you love your dog is therefore to be confused.

Of course, we do not respond with love to the dignity of every person we meet, nor are we somehow required to: love, as the disarming of our emotional defenses in a way that makes us especially vulnerable to another, is the optional maximal response to others’ dignity. What, then, explains the selectivity of love—why I love some people and not others? The answer lies in the contingent fit between the way some people behaviorally express their dignity as persons and the way I happen to respond to those expressions by becoming emotionally vulnerable to them. The right sort of fit makes someone “lovable” by me (1999, p. 372), and my responding with love in these cases is a matter of my “really seeing” this person in a way that I fail to do with others who do not fit with me in this way. By ‘lovable’ here Velleman seems to mean able to be loved, not worthy of being loved, for nothing Velleman says here speaks to a question about the justification of my loving this person rather than that. Rather, what he offers is an explanation of the selectivity of my love, an explanation that as a matter of fact makes my response be that of love rather than mere respect.

This understanding of the selectivity of love as something that can be explained but not justified is potentially troubling. For we ordinarily think we can justify not only my loving you rather than someone else but also and more importantly the constancy of my love: my continuing to love you even as you change in certain fundamental ways (but not others). As Delaney (1996, p. 347) puts the worry about constancy:

while you seem to want it to be true that, were you to become a schmuck, your lover would continue to love you,…you also want it to be the case that your lover would never love a schmuck.

The issue here is not merely that we can offer explanations of the selectivity of my love, of why I do not love schmucks; rather, at issue is the discernment of love, of loving and continuing to love for good reasons as well as of ceasing to love for good reasons. To have these good reasons seems to involve attributing different values to you now rather than formerly or rather than to someone else, yet this is precisely what Velleman denies is the case in making the distinction between love and respect the way he does.

It is also questionable whether Velleman can even explain the selectivity of love in terms of the “fit” between your expressions and my sensitivities. For the relevant sensitivities on my part are emotional sensitivities: the lowering of my emotional defenses and so becoming emotionally vulnerable to you. Thus, I become vulnerable to the harms (or goods) that befall you and so sympathetically feel your pain (or joy). Such emotions are themselves assessable for warrant, and now we can ask why my disappointment that you lost the race is warranted, but my being disappointed that a mere stranger lost would not be warranted. The intuitive answer is that I love you but not him. However, this answer is unavailable to Velleman, because he thinks that what makes my response to your dignity that of love rather than respect is precisely that I feel such emotions, and to appeal to my love in explaining the emotions therefore seems viciously circular.

Although these problems are specific to Velleman’s account, the difficulty can be generalized to any appraisal account of love (such as that offered in Kolodny 2003). For if love is an appraisal, it needs to be distinguished from other forms of appraisal, including our evaluative judgments. On the one hand, to try to distinguish love as an appraisal from other appraisals in terms of love’s having certain effects on our emotional and motivational life (as on Velleman’s account) is unsatisfying because it ignores part of what needs to be explained: why the appraisal of love has these effects and yet judgments with the same evaluative content do not. Indeed, this question is crucial if we are to understand the intuitive “depth” of love, for without an answer to this question we do not understand why love should have the kind of centrality in our lives it manifestly does. [ 9 ] On the other hand, to bundle this emotional component into the appraisal itself would be to turn the view into either the robust concern view ( Section 3 ) or a variant of the emotion view ( Section 5.1 ).

In contrast to Velleman, Singer (1991, 1994, 2009) understands love to be fundamentally a matter of bestowing value on the beloved. To bestow value on another is to project a kind of intrinsic value onto him. Indeed, this fact about love is supposed to distinguish love from liking: “Love is an attitude with no clear objective,” whereas liking is inherently teleological (1991, p. 272). As such, there are no standards of correctness for bestowing such value, and this is how love differs from other personal attitudes like gratitude, generosity, and condescension: “love…confers importance no matter what the object is worth” (p. 273). Consequently, Singer thinks, love is not an attitude that can be justified in any way.

What is it, exactly, to bestow this kind of value on someone? It is, Singer says, a kind of attachment and commitment to the beloved, in which one comes to treat him as an end in himself and so to respond to his ends, interests, concerns, etc. as having value for their own sake. This means in part that the bestowal of value reveals itself “by caring about the needs and interests of the beloved, by wishing to benefit or protect her, by delighting in her achievements,” etc. (p. 270). This sounds very much like the robust concern view, yet the bestowal view differs in understanding such robust concern to be the effect of the bestowal of value that is love rather than itself what constitutes love: in bestowing value on my beloved, I make him be valuable in such a way that I ought to respond with robust concern.

For it to be intelligible that I have bestowed value on someone, I must therefore respond appropriately to him as valuable, and this requires having some sense of what his well-being is and of what affects that well-being positively or negatively. Yet having this sense requires in turn knowing what his strengths and deficiencies are, and this is a matter of appraising him in various ways. Bestowal thus presupposes a kind of appraisal, as a way of “really seeing” the beloved and attending to him. Nonetheless, Singer claims, it is the bestowal that is primary for understanding what love consists in: the appraisal is required only so that the commitment to one’s beloved and his value as thus bestowed has practical import and is not “a blind submission to some unknown being” (1991, p. 272; see also Singer 1994, pp. 139ff).

Singer is walking a tightrope in trying to make room for appraisal in his account of love. Insofar as the account is fundamentally a bestowal account, Singer claims that love cannot be justified, that we bestow the relevant kind of value “gratuitously.” This suggests that love is blind, that it does not matter what our beloved is like, which seems patently false. Singer tries to avoid this conclusion by appealing to the role of appraisal: it is only because we appraise another as having certain virtues and vices that we come to bestow value on him. Yet the “because” here, since it cannot justify the bestowal, is at best a kind of contingent causal explanation. [ 10 ] In this respect, Singer’s account of the selectivity of love is much the same as Velleman’s, and it is liable to the same criticism: it makes unintelligible the way in which our love can be discerning for better or worse reasons. Indeed, this failure to make sense of the idea that love can be justified is a problem for any bestowal view. For either (a) a bestowal itself cannot be justified (as on Singer’s account), in which case the justification of love is impossible, or (b) a bestowal can be justified, in which case it is hard to make sense of value as being bestowed rather than there antecedently in the object as the grounds of that “bestowal.”

More generally, a proponent of the bestowal view needs to be much clearer than Singer is in articulating precisely what a bestowal is. What is the value that I create in a bestowal, and how can my bestowal create it? On a crude Humean view, the answer might be that the value is something projected onto the world through my pro-attitudes, like desire. Yet such a view would be inadequate, since the projected value, being relative to a particular individual, would do no theoretical work, and the account would essentially be a variant of the robust concern view. Moreover, in providing a bestowal account of love, care is needed to distinguish love from other personal attitudes such as admiration and respect: do these other attitudes involve bestowal? If so, how does the bestowal in these cases differ from the bestowal of love? If not, why not, and what is so special about love that requires a fundamentally different evaluative attitude than admiration and respect?

Nonetheless, there is a kernel of truth in the bestowal view: there is surely something right about the idea that love is creative and not merely a response to antecedent value, and accounts of love that understand the kind of evaluation implicit in love merely in terms of appraisal seem to be missing something. Precisely what may be missed will be discussed below in Section 6 .

Perhaps there is room for an understanding of love and its relation to value that is intermediate between appraisal and bestowal accounts. After all, if we think of appraisal as something like perception, a matter of responding to what is out there in the world, and of bestowal as something like action, a matter of doing something and creating something, we should recognize that the responsiveness central to appraisal may itself depend on our active, creative choices. Thus, just as we must recognize that ordinary perception depends on our actively directing our attention and deploying concepts, interpretations, and even arguments in order to perceive things accurately, so too we might think our vision of our beloved’s valuable properties that is love also depends on our actively attending to and interpreting him. Something like this is Jollimore’s view (2011). According to Jollimore, in loving someone we actively attend to his valuable properties in a way that we take to provide us with reasons to treat him preferentially. Although we may acknowledge that others might have such properties even to a greater degree than our beloved does, we do not attend to and appreciate such properties in others in the same way we do those in our beloveds; indeed, we find our appreciation of our beloved’s valuable properties to “silence” our similar appreciation of those in others. (In this way, Jollimore thinks, we can solve the problem of fungibility, discussed below in Section 6 .) Likewise, in perceiving our beloved’s actions and character, we do so through the lens of such an appreciation, which will tend as to “silence” interpretations inconsistent with that appreciation. In this way, love involves finding one’s beloved to be valuable in a way that involves elements of both appraisal (insofar as one must thereby be responsive to valuable properties one’s beloved really has) and bestowal (insofar as through one’s attention and committed appreciation of these properties they come to have special significance for one).

One might object that this conception of love as silencing the special value of others or to negative interpretations of our beloveds is irrational in a way that love is not. For, it might seem, such “silencing” is merely a matter of our blinding ourselves to how things really are. Yet Jollimore claims that this sense in which love is blind is not objectionable, for (a) we can still intellectually recognize the things that love’s vision silences, and (b) there really is no impartial perspective we can take on the values things have, and love is one appropriate sort of partial perspective from which the value of persons can be manifest. Nonetheless, one might wonder about whether that perspective of love itself can be distorted and what the norms are in terms of which such distortions are intelligible. Furthermore, it may seem that Jollimore’s attempt to reconcile appraisal and bestowal fails to appreciate the underlying metaphysical difficulty: appraisal is a response to value that is antecedently there, whereas bestowal is the creation of value that was not antecedently there. Consequently, it might seem, appraisal and bestowal are mutually exclusive and cannot be reconciled in the way Jollimore hopes.

Whereas Jollimore tries to combine separate elements of appraisal and of bestowal in a single account, Helm (2010) and Bagley (2015) offer accounts that reject the metaphysical presupposition that values must be either prior to love (as with appraisal) or posterior to love (as with bestowal), instead understanding the love and the values to emerge simultaneously. Thus, Helm presents a detailed account of valuing in terms of the emotions, arguing that while we can understand individual emotions as appraisals , responding to values already their in their objects, these values are bestowed on those objects via broad, holistic patterns of emotions. How this amounts to an account of love will be discussed in Section 5.2 , below. Bagley (2015) instead appeals to a metaphor of improvisation, arguing that just as jazz musicians jointly make determinate the content of their musical ideas through on-going processes of their expression, so too lovers jointly engage in “deep improvisation”, thereby working out of their values and identities through the on-going process of living their lives together. These values are thus something the lovers jointly construct through the process of recognizing and responding to those very values. To love someone is thus to engage with them as partners in such “deep improvisation”. (This account is similar to Helm (2008, 2010)’s account of plural agency, which he uses to provide an account of friendship and other loving relationships; see the discussion of shared activity in the entry on friendship .)

5. Emotion Views

Given these problems with the accounts of love as valuing, perhaps we should turn to the emotions. For emotions just are responses to objects that combine evaluation, motivation, and a kind of phenomenology, all central features of the attitude of love.

Many accounts of love claim that it is an emotion; these include: Wollheim 1984, Rorty 1986/1993, Brown 1987, Hamlyn 1989, Baier 1991, and Badhwar 2003. [ 11 ] Thus, Hamlyn (1989, p. 219) says:

It would not be a plausible move to defend any theory of the emotions to which love and hate seemed exceptions by saying that love and hate are after all not emotions. I have heard this said, but it does seem to me a desperate move to make. If love and hate are not emotions what is?

The difficulty with this claim, as Rorty (1980) argues, is that the word, ‘emotion,’ does not seem to pick out a homogeneous collection of mental states, and so various theories claiming that love is an emotion mean very different things. Consequently, what are here labeled “emotion views” are divided into those that understand love to be a particular kind of evaluative-cum-motivational response to an object, whether that response is merely occurrent or dispositional (‘emotions proper,’ see Section 5.1 , below), and those that understand love to involve a collection of related and interconnected emotions proper (‘emotion complexes,’ see Section 5.2 , below).

An emotion proper is a kind of “evaluative-cum-motivational response to an object”; what does this mean? Emotions are generally understood to have several objects. The target of an emotion is that at which the emotion is directed: if I am afraid or angry at you, then you are the target. In responding to you with fear or anger, I am implicitly evaluating you in a particular way, and this evaluation—called the formal object —is the kind of evaluation of the target that is distinctive of a particular emotion type. Thus, in fearing you, I implicitly evaluate you as somehow dangerous, whereas in being angry at you I implicitly evaluate you as somehow offensive. Yet emotions are not merely evaluations of their targets; they in part motivate us to behave in certain ways, both rationally (by motivating action to avoid the danger) and arationally (via certain characteristic expressions, such as slamming a door out of anger). Moreover, emotions are generally understood to involve a phenomenological component, though just how to understand the characteristic “feel” of an emotion and its relation to the evaluation and motivation is hotly disputed. Finally, emotions are typically understood to be passions: responses that we feel imposed on us as if from the outside, rather than anything we actively do. (For more on the philosophy of emotions, see entry on emotion .)

What then are we saying when we say that love is an emotion proper? According to Brown (1987, p. 14), emotions as occurrent mental states are “abnormal bodily changes caused by the agent’s evaluation or appraisal of some object or situation that the agent believes to be of concern to him or her.” He spells this out by saying that in love, we “cherish” the person for having “a particular complex of instantiated qualities” that is “open-ended” so that we can continue to love the person even as she changes over time (pp. 106–7). These qualities, which include historical and relational qualities, are evaluated in love as worthwhile. [ 12 ] All of this seems aimed at spelling out what love’s formal object is, a task that is fundamental to understanding love as an emotion proper. Thus, Brown seems to say that love’s formal object is just being worthwhile (or, given his examples, perhaps: worthwhile as a person), and he resists being any more specific than this in order to preserve the open-endedness of love. Hamlyn (1989) offers a similar account, saying (p. 228):

With love the difficulty is to find anything of this kind [i.e., a formal object] which is uniquely appropriate to love. My thesis is that there is nothing of this kind that must be so, and that this differentiates it and hate from the other emotions.

Hamlyn goes on to suggest that love and hate might be primordial emotions, a kind of positive or negative “feeling towards,” presupposed by all other emotions. [ 13 ]

The trouble with these accounts of love as an emotion proper is that they provide too thin a conception of love. In Hamlyn’s case, love is conceived as a fairly generic pro-attitude, rather than as the specific kind of distinctively personal attitude discussed here. In Brown’s case, spelling out the formal object of love as simply being worthwhile (as a person) fails to distinguish love from other evaluative responses like admiration and respect. Part of the problem seems to be the rather simple account of what an emotion is that Brown and Hamlyn use as their starting point: if love is an emotion, then the understanding of what an emotion is must be enriched considerably to accommodate love. Yet it is not at all clear whether the idea of an “emotion proper” can be adequately enriched so as to do so. As Pismenny & Prinz (2017) point out, love seems to be too varied both in its ground and in the sort of experience it involves to be capturable by a single emotion.

The emotion complex view, which understands love to be a complex emotional attitude towards another person, may initially seem to hold out great promise to overcome the problems of alternative types of views. By articulating the emotional interconnections between persons, it could offer a satisfying account of the “depth” of love without the excesses of the union view and without the overly narrow teleological focus of the robust concern view; and because these emotional interconnections are themselves evaluations, it could offer an understanding of love as simultaneously evaluative, without needing to specify a single formal object of love. However, the devil is in the details.

Rorty (1986/1993) does not try to present a complete account of love; rather, she focuses on the idea that “relational psychological attitudes” which, like love, essentially involve emotional and desiderative responses, exhibit historicity : “they arise from, and are shaped by, dynamic interactions between a subject and an object” (p. 73). In part this means that what makes an attitude be one of love is not the presence of a state that we can point to at a particular time within the lover; rather, love is to be “identified by a characteristic narrative history” (p. 75). Moreover, Rorty argues, the historicity of love involves the lover’s being permanently transformed by loving who he does.

Baier (1991), seeming to pick up on this understanding of love as exhibiting historicity, says (p. 444):

Love is not just an emotion people feel toward other people, but also a complex tying together of the emotions that two or a few more people have; it is a special form of emotional interdependence.

To a certain extent, such emotional interdependence involves feeling sympathetic emotions, so that, for example, I feel disappointed and frustrated on behalf of my beloved when she fails, and joyful when she succeeds. However, Baier insists, love is “more than just the duplication of the emotion of each in a sympathetic echo in the other” (p. 442); the emotional interdependence of the lovers involves also appropriate follow-up responses to the emotional predicaments of your beloved. Two examples Baier gives (pp. 443–44) are a feeling of “mischievous delight” at your beloved’s temporary bafflement, and amusement at her embarrassment. The idea is that in a loving relationship your beloved gives you permission to feel such emotions when no one else is permitted to do so, and a condition of her granting you that permission is that you feel these emotions “tenderly.” Moreover, you ought to respond emotionally to your beloved’s emotional responses to you: by feeling hurt when she is indifferent to you, for example. All of these foster the sort of emotional interdependence Baier is after—a kind of intimacy you have with your beloved.

Badhwar (2003, p. 46) similarly understands love to be a matter of “one’s overall emotional orientation towards a person—the complex of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings”; as such, love is a matter of having a certain “character structure.” Central to this complex emotional orientation, Badhwar thinks, is what she calls the “look of love”: “an ongoing [emotional] affirmation of the loved object as worthy of existence…for her own sake” (p. 44), an affirmation that involves taking pleasure in your beloved’s well-being. Moreover, Badhwar claims, the look of love also provides to the beloved reliable testimony concerning the quality of the beloved’s character and actions (p. 57).

There is surely something very right about the idea that love, as an attitude central to deeply personal relationships, should not be understood as a state that can simply come and go. Rather, as the emotion complex view insists, the complexity of love is to be found in the historical patterns of one’s emotional responsiveness to one’s beloved—a pattern that also projects into the future. Indeed, as suggested above, the kind of emotional interdependence that results from this complex pattern can seem to account for the intuitive “depth” of love as fully interwoven into one’s emotional sense of oneself. And it seems to make some headway in understanding the complex phenomenology of love: love can at times be a matter of intense pleasure in the presence of one’s beloved, yet it can at other times involve frustration, exasperation, anger, and hurt as a manifestation of the complexities and depth of the relationships it fosters.

This understanding of love as constituted by a history of emotional interdependence enables emotion complex views to say something interesting about the impact love has on the lover’s identity. This is partly Rorty’s point (1986/1993) in her discussion of the historicity of love ( above ). Thus, she argues, one important feature of such historicity is that love is “ dynamically permeable ” in that the lover is continually “changed by loving” such that these changes “tend to ramify through a person’s character” (p. 77). Through such dynamic permeability, love transforms the identity of the lover in a way that can sometimes foster the continuity of the love, as each lover continually changes in response to the changes in the other. [ 14 ] Indeed, Rorty concludes, love should be understood in terms of “a characteristic narrative history” (p. 75) that results from such dynamic permeability. It should be clear, however, that the mere fact of dynamic permeability need not result in the love’s continuing: nothing about the dynamics of a relationship requires that the characteristic narrative history project into the future, and such permeability can therefore lead to the dissolution of the love. Love is therefore risky—indeed, all the more risky because of the way the identity of the lover is defined in part through the love. The loss of a love can therefore make one feel no longer oneself in ways poignantly described by Nussbaum (1990).

By focusing on such emotionally complex histories, emotion complex views differ from most alternative accounts of love. For alternative accounts tend to view love as a kind of attitude we take toward our beloveds, something we can analyze simply in terms of our mental state at the moment. [ 15 ] By ignoring this historical dimension of love in providing an account of what love is, alternative accounts have a hard time providing either satisfying accounts of the sense in which our identities as person are at stake in loving another or satisfactory solutions to problems concerning how love is to be justified (cf. Section 6 , especially the discussion of fungibility ).

Nonetheless, some questions remain. If love is to be understood as an emotion complex, we need a much more explicit account of the pattern at issue here: what ties all of these emotional responses together into a single thing, namely love? Baier and Badhwar seem content to provide interesting and insightful examples of this pattern, but that does not seem to be enough. For example, what connects my amusement at my beloved’s embarrassment to other emotions like my joy on his behalf when he succeeds? Why shouldn’t my amusement at his embarrassment be understood instead as a somewhat cruel case of schadenfreude and so as antithetical to, and disconnected from, love? Moreover, as Naar (2013) notes, we need a principled account of when such historical patterns are disrupted in such a way as to end the love and when they are not. Do I stop loving when, in the midst of clinical depression, I lose my normal pattern of emotional concern?

Presumably the answer requires returning to the historicity of love: it all depends on the historical details of the relationship my beloved and I have forged. Some loves develop so that the intimacy within the relationship is such as to allow for tender, teasing responses to each other, whereas other loves may not. The historical details, together with the lovers’ understanding of their relationship, presumably determine which emotional responses belong to the pattern constitutive of love and which do not. However, this answer so far is inadequate: not just any historical relationship involving emotional interdependence is a loving relationship, and we need a principled way of distinguishing loving relationships from other relational evaluative attitudes: precisely what is the characteristic narrative history that is characteristic of love?

Helm (2009, 2010) tries to answer some of these questions in presenting an account of love as intimate identification. To love another, Helm claims, is to care about him as the particular person he is and so, other things being equal, to value the things he values. Insofar as a person’s (structured) set of values—his sense of the kind of life worth his living—constitutes his identity as a person, such sharing of values amounts to sharing his identity, which sounds very much like union accounts of love. However, Helm is careful to understand such sharing of values as for the sake of the beloved (as robust concern accounts insist), and he spells this all out in terms of patterns of emotions. Thus, Helm claims, all emotions have not only a target and a formal object (as indicated above), but also a focus : a background object the subject cares about in terms of which the implicit evaluation of the target is made intelligible. (For example, if I am afraid of the approaching hailstorm, I thereby evaluate it as dangerous, and what explains this evaluation is the way that hailstorm bears on my vegetable garden, which I care about; my garden, therefore, is the focus of my fear.) Moreover, emotions normally come in patterns with a common focus: fearing the hailstorm is normally connected to other emotions as being relieved when it passes by harmlessly (or disappointed or sad when it does not), being angry at the rabbits for killing the spinach, delighted at the productivity of the tomato plants, etc. Helm argues that a projectible pattern of such emotions with a common focus constitute caring about that focus. Consequently, we might say along the lines of Section 4.3 , while particular emotions appraise events in the world as having certain evaluative properties, their having these properties is partly bestowed on them by the overall patterns of emotions.

Helm identifies some emotions as person-focused emotions : emotions like pride and shame that essentially take persons as their focuses, for these emotions implicitly evaluate in terms of the target’s bearing on the quality of life of the person that is their focus. To exhibit a pattern of such emotions focused on oneself and subfocused on being a mother, for example, is to care about the place being a mother has in the kind of life you find worth living—in your identity as a person; to care in this way is to value being a mother as a part of your concern for your own identity. Likewise, to exhibit a projectible pattern of such emotions focused on someone else and subfocused on his being a father is to value this as a part of your concern for his identity—to value it for his sake. Such sharing of another’s values for his sake, which, Helm argues, essentially involves trust, respect, and affection, amounts to intimate identification with him, and such intimate identification just is love. Thus, Helm tries to provide an account of love that is grounded in an explicit account of caring (and caring about something for the sake of someone else) that makes room for the intuitive “depth” of love through intimate identification.

Jaworska & Wonderly (2017) argue that Helm’s construal of intimacy as intimate identification is too demanding. Rather, they argue, the sort of intimacy that distinguishes love from mere caring is one that involves a kind of emotional vulnerability in which things going well or poorly for one’s beloved are directly connected not merely to one’s well-being, but to one’s ability to flourish. This connection, they argue, runs through the lover’s self-understanding and the place the beloved has in the lover’s sense of a meaningful life.

Why do we love? It has been suggested above that any account of love needs to be able to answer some such justificatory question. Although the issue of the justification of love is important on its own, it is also important for the implications it has for understanding more clearly the precise object of love: how can we make sense of the intuitions not only that we love the individuals themselves rather than their properties, but also that my beloved is not fungible—that no one could simply take her place without loss. Different theories approach these questions in different ways, but, as will become clear below, the question of justification is primary.

One way to understand the question of why we love is as asking for what the value of love is: what do we get out of it? One kind of answer, which has its roots in Aristotle, is that having loving relationships promotes self-knowledge insofar as your beloved acts as a kind of mirror, reflecting your character back to you (Badhwar, 2003, p. 58). Of course, this answer presupposes that we cannot accurately know ourselves in other ways: that left alone, our sense of ourselves will be too imperfect, too biased, to help us grow and mature as persons. The metaphor of a mirror also suggests that our beloveds will be in the relevant respects similar to us, so that merely by observing them, we can come to know ourselves better in a way that is, if not free from bias, at least more objective than otherwise.

Brink (1999, pp. 264–65) argues that there are serious limits to the value of such mirroring of one’s self in a beloved. For if the aim is not just to know yourself better but to improve yourself, you ought also to interact with others who are not just like yourself: interacting with such diverse others can help you recognize alternative possibilities for how to live and so better assess the relative merits of these possibilities. Whiting (2013) also emphasizes the importance of our beloveds’ having an independent voice capable of reflecting not who one now is but an ideal for who one is to be. Nonetheless, we need not take the metaphor of the mirror quite so literally; rather, our beloveds can reflect our selves not through their inherent similarity to us but rather through the interpretations they offer of us, both explicitly and implicitly in their responses to us. This is what Badhwar calls the “epistemic significance” of love. [ 16 ]

In addition to this epistemic significance of love, LaFollette (1996, Chapter 5) offers several other reasons why it is good to love, reasons derived in part from the psychological literature on love: love increases our sense of well-being, it elevates our sense of self-worth, and it serves to develop our character. It also, we might add, tends to lower stress and blood pressure and to increase health and longevity. Friedman (1993) argues that the kind of partiality towards our beloveds that love involves is itself morally valuable because it supports relationships—loving relationships—that contribute “to human well-being, integrity, and fulfillment in life” (p. 61). And Solomon (1988, p. 155) claims:

Ultimately, there is only one reason for love. That one grand reason…is “because we bring out the best in each other.” What counts as “the best,” of course, is subject to much individual variation.

This is because, Solomon suggests, in loving someone, I want myself to be better so as to be worthy of his love for me.

Each of these answers to the question of why we love understands it to be asking about love quite generally, abstracted away from details of particular relationships. It is also possible to understand the question as asking about particular loves. Here, there are several questions that are relevant:

• What, if anything, justifies my loving rather than not loving this particular person?
• What, if anything, justifies my coming to love this particular person rather than someone else?
• What, if anything, justifies my continuing to love this particular person given the changes—both in him and me and in the overall circumstances—that have occurred since I began loving him?

These are importantly different questions. Velleman (1999), for example, thinks we can answer (1) by appealing to the fact that my beloved is a person and so has a rational nature, yet he thinks (2) and (3) have no answers: the best we can do is offer causal explanations for our loving particular people, a position echoed by Han (2021). Setiya (2014) similarly thinks (1) has an answer, but points not to the rational nature of persons but rather to the other’s humanity , where such humanity differs from personhood in that not all humans need have the requisite rational nature for personhood, and not all persons need be humans. And, as will become clear below , the distinction between (2) and (3) will become important in resolving puzzles concerning whether our beloveds are fungible, though it should be clear that (3) potentially raises questions concerning personal identity (which will not be addressed here).

It is important not to misconstrue these justificatory questions. Thomas (1991) , for example, rejects the idea that love can be justified: “there are no rational considerations whereby anyone can lay claim to another’s love or insist that an individual’s love for another is irrational” (p. 474). This is because, Thomas claims (p. 471):

no matter how wonderful and lovely an individual might be, on any and all accounts, it is simply false that a romantically unencumbered person must love that individual on pain of being irrational. Or, there is no irrationality involved in ceasing to love a person whom one once loved immensely, although the person has not changed.

However, as LaFollette (1996, p. 63) correctly points out,

reason is not some external power which dictates how we should behave, but an internal power, integral to who we are.… Reason does not command that we love anyone. Nonetheless, reason is vital in determining whom we love and why we love them.

That is, reasons for love are pro tanto : they are a part of the overall reasons we have for acting, and it is up to us in exercising our capacity for agency to decide what on balance we have reason to do or even whether we shall act contrary to our reasons. To construe the notion of a reason for love as compelling us to love, as Thomas does, is to misconstrue the place such reasons have within our agency. [ 17 ]

Most philosophical discussions of the justification of love focus on question (1) , thinking that answering this question will also, to the extent that we can, answer question (2) , which is typically not distinguished from (3) . The answers given to these questions vary in a way that turns on how the kind of evaluation implicit in love is construed. On the one hand, those who understand the evaluation implicit in love to be a matter of the bestowal of value (such as Telfer 1970–71; Friedman 1993; Singer 1994) typically claim that no justification can be given (cf. Section 4.2 ). As indicated above, this seems problematic, especially given the importance love can have both in our lives and, especially, in shaping our identities as persons. To reject the idea that we can love for reasons may reduce the impact our agency can have in defining who we are.

On the other hand, those who understand the evaluation implicit in love to be a matter of appraisal tend to answer the justificatory question by appeal to these valuable properties of the beloved. This acceptance of the idea that love can be justified leads to two further, related worries about the object of love.

The first worry is raised by Vlastos (1981) in a discussion Plato’s and Aristotle’s accounts of love. Vlastos notes that these accounts focus on the properties of our beloveds: we are to love people, they say, only because and insofar as they are objectifications of the excellences. Consequently, he argues, in doing so they fail to distinguish “ disinterested affection for the person we love” from “ appreciation of the excellences instantiated by that person ” (p. 33). That is, Vlastos thinks that Plato and Aristotle provide an account of love that is really a love of properties rather than a love of persons—love of a type of person, rather than love of a particular person—thereby losing what is distinctive about love as an essentially personal attitude. This worry about Plato and Aristotle might seem to apply just as well to other accounts that justify love in terms of the properties of the person: insofar as we love the person for the sake of her properties, it might seem that what we love is those properties and not the person. Here it is surely insufficient to say, as Solomon (1988, p. 154) does, “if love has its reasons, then it is not the whole person that one loves but certain aspects of that person—though the rest of the person comes along too, of course”: that final tagline fails to address the central difficulty about what the object of love is and so about love as a distinctly personal attitude. (Clausen 2019 might seem to address this worry by arguing that we love people not as having certain properties but rather as having “ organic unities ”: a holistic set of properties the value of each of which must be understood in essential part in terms of its place within that whole. Nonetheless, while this is an interesting and plausible way to think about the value of the properties of persons, that organic unity itself will be a (holistic) property held by the person, and it seems that the fundamental problem reemerges at the level of this holistic property: do we love the holistic unity rather than the person?)

The second worry concerns the fungibility of the object of love. To be fungible is to be replaceable by another relevantly similar object without any loss of value. Thus, money is fungible: I can give you two $5 bills in exchange for a $10 bill, and neither of us has lost anything. Is the object of love fungible? That is, can I simply switch from loving one person to loving another relevantly similar person without any loss? The worry about fungibility is commonly put this way: if we accept that love can be justified by appealing to properties of the beloved, then it may seem that in loving someone for certain reasons, I love him not simply as the individual he is, but as instantiating those properties. And this may imply that any other person instantiating those same properties would do just as well: my beloved would be fungible. Indeed, it may be that another person exhibits the properties that ground my love to a greater degree than my current beloved does, and so it may seem that in such a case I have reason to “trade up”—to switch my love to the new, better person. However, it seems clear that the objects of our loves are not fungible: love seems to involve a deeply personal commitment to a particular person, a commitment that is antithetical to the idea that our beloveds are fungible or to the idea that we ought to be willing to trade up when possible. [ 18 ]

In responding to these worries, Nozick (1989) appeals to the union view of love he endorses (see the section on Love as Union ):

The intention in love is to form a we and to identify with it as an extended self, to identify one’s fortunes in large part with its fortunes. A willingness to trade up, to destroy the very we you largely identify with, would then be a willingness to destroy your self in the form of your own extended self. [p. 78]

So it is because love involves forming a “we” that we must understand other persons and not properties to be the objects of love, and it is because my very identity as a person depends essentially on that “we” that it is not possible to substitute without loss one object of my love for another. However, Badhwar (2003) criticizes Nozick, saying that his response implies that once I love someone, I cannot abandon that love no matter who that person becomes; this, she says, “cannot be understood as love at all rather than addiction” (p. 61). [ 19 ]

Instead, Badhwar (1987) turns to her robust-concern account of love as a concern for the beloved for his sake rather than one’s own. Insofar as my love is disinterested — not a means to antecedent ends of my own—it would be senseless to think that my beloved could be replaced by someone who is able to satisfy my ends equally well or better. Consequently, my beloved is in this way irreplaceable. However, this is only a partial response to the worry about fungibility, as Badhwar herself seems to acknowledge. For the concern over fungibility arises not merely for those cases in which we think of love as justified instrumentally, but also for those cases in which the love is justified by the intrinsic value of the properties of my beloved. Confronted with cases like this, Badhwar (2003) concludes that the object of love is fungible after all (though she insists that it is very unlikely in practice). (Soble (1990, Chapter 13) draws similar conclusions.)

Nonetheless, Badhwar thinks that the object of love is “phenomenologically non-fungible” (2003, p. 63; see also 1987, p. 14). By this she means that we experience our beloveds to be irreplaceable: “loving and delighting in [one person] are not completely commensurate with loving and delighting in another” (1987, p. 14). Love can be such that we sometimes desire to be with this particular person whom we love, not another whom we also love, for our loves are qualitatively different. But why is this? It seems as though the typical reason I now want to spend time with Amy rather than Bob is, for example, that Amy is funny but Bob is not. I love Amy in part for her humor, and I love Bob for other reasons, and these qualitative differences between them is what makes them not fungible. However, this reply does not address the worry about the possibility of trading up: if Bob were to be at least as funny (charming, kind, etc.) as Amy, why shouldn’t I dump her and spend all my time with him?

A somewhat different approach is taken by Whiting (1991). In response to the first worry concerning the object of love, Whiting argues that Vlastos offers a false dichotomy: having affection for someone that is disinterested —for her sake rather than my own—essentially involves an appreciation of her excellences as such. Indeed, Whiting says, my appreciation of these as excellences, and so the underlying commitment I have to their value, just is a disinterested commitment to her because these excellences constitute her identity as the person she is. The person, therefore, really is the object of love. Delaney (1996) takes the complementary tack of distinguishing between the object of one’s love, which of course is the person, and the grounds of the love, which are her properties: to say, as Solomon does, that we love someone for reasons is not at all to say that we only love certain aspects of the person. In these terms, we might say that Whiting’s rejection of Vlastos’ dichotomy can be read as saying that what makes my attitude be one of disinterested affection—one of love—for the person is precisely that I am thereby responding to her excellences as the reasons for that affection. [ 20 ]

Of course, more needs to be said about what it is that makes a particular person be the object of love. Implicit in Whiting’s account is an understanding of the way in which the object of my love is determined in part by the history of interactions I have with her: it is she, and not merely her properties (which might be instantiated in many different people), that I want to be with; it is she, and not merely her properties, on whose behalf I am concerned when she suffers and whom I seek to comfort; etc. This addresses the first worry, but not the second worry about fungibility, for the question still remains whether she is the object of my love only as instantiating certain properties, and so whether or not I have reason to “trade up.”

To respond to the fungibility worry, Whiting and Delaney appeal explicitly to the historical relationship. [ 21 ] Thus, Whiting claims, although there may be a relatively large pool of people who have the kind of excellences of character that would justify my loving them, and so although there can be no answer to question (2) about why I come to love this rather than that person within this pool, once I have come to love this person and so have developed a historical relation with her, this history of concern justifies my continuing to love this person rather than someone else (1991, p. 7). Similarly, Delaney claims that love is grounded in “historical-relational properties” (1996, p. 346), so that I have reasons for continuing to love this person rather than switching allegiances and loving someone else. In each case, the appeal to both such historical relations and the excellences of character of my beloved is intended to provide an answer to question (3) , and this explains why the objects of love are not fungible.

There seems to be something very much right with this response. Relationships grounded in love are essentially personal, and it would be odd to think of what justifies that love to be merely non-relational properties of the beloved. Nonetheless, it is still unclear how the historical-relational propreties can provide any additional justification for subsequent concern beyond that which is already provided (as an answer to question (1) ) by appeal to the excellences of the beloved’s character (cf. Brink 1999). The mere fact that I have loved someone in the past does not seem to justify my continuing to love him in the future. When we imagine that he is going through a rough time and begins to lose the virtues justifying my initial love for him, why shouldn’t I dump him and instead come to love someone new having all of those virtues more fully? Intuitively (unless the change she undergoes makes her in some important sense no longer the same person he was), we think I should not dump him, but the appeal to the mere fact that I loved him in the past is surely not enough. Yet what historical-relational properties could do the trick? (For an interesting attempt at an answer, see Kolodny 2003 and also Howard 2019.)

If we think that love can be justified, then it may seem that the appeal to particular historical facts about a loving relationship to justify that love is inadequate, for such idiosyncratic and subjective properties might explain but cannot justify love. Rather, it may seem, justification in general requires appealing to universal, objective properties. But such properties are ones that others might share, which leads to the problem of fungibility. Consequently it may seem that love cannot be justified. In the face of this predicament, accounts of love that understand love to be an attitude towards value that is intermediate between appraisal and bestowal, between recognizing already existing value and creating that value (see Section 4.3 ) might seem to offer a way out. For once we reject the thought that the value of our beloveds must be either the precondition or the consequence of our love, we have room to acknowledge that the deeply personal, historically grounded, creative nature of love (central to bestowal accounts) and the understanding of love as responsive to valuable properties of the beloved that can justify that love (central to appraisal accounts) are not mutually exclusive (Helm 2010; Bagley 2015).

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• Aristotle , Nicomachean Ethics , translated by W.D. Ross.
• Moseley, A., “ Philosophy of Love ,” in J. Fieser (ed.), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving

• Simon Cushing 0

University of Michigan–Flint, Flint, USA

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New philosophical essays on love by a diverse group of international scholars

Includes contributions to the ongoing debate on whether love is arational or if there are reasons for love

Also whether love can explain the difference between nationalism and patriotism

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Table of contents (14 chapters)

Front matter, introduction.

Simon Cushing

Making Room for Love in Kantian Ethics

• Ernesto V. Garcia

Iris Murdoch and the Epistemic Significance of Love

• Cathy Mason

‘Love’ as a Practice: Looking at Real People

• Lotte Spreeuwenberg

Love, Choice, and Taking Responsibility

• Christopher Cowley

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

• Andrew Sneddon

Doubting Love

• Larry A. Herzberg

Love and Free Agency

• Ishtiyaque Haji

Sentimental Reasons

• Edgar Phillips

Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Enticing Reasons for Love

• N. L. Engel-Hawbecker

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

• Monica Roland

Can Our Beloved Pets Love Us Back?

• Ryan Stringer

Romantic Love Between Humans and AIs: A Feminist Ethical Critique

• Andrea Klonschinski, Michael Kühler

Patriotism and Nationalism as Two Distinct Ways of Loving One’s Country

• Maria Ioannou, Martijn Boot, Ryan Wittingslow, Adriana Mattos

Back Matter

• Rationality
• Artificial Intelligence
• Iris Murdoch
• Non-Human Animals

Book Title : New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving

Editors : Simon Cushing

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72324-8

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan Cham

eBook Packages : Religion and Philosophy , Philosophy and Religion (R0)

Copyright Information : The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-030-72323-1 Published: 21 September 2021

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-030-72326-2 Published: 22 September 2022

eBook ISBN : 978-3-030-72324-8 Published: 20 September 2021

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XII, 322

Topics : Philosophy of Mind , Ethics , Social Philosophy , Emotion

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Love: The Basic Questions

Susan Wolf is Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

• Published: 11 January 2018
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It is a common and plausible thought that love is one of the most important things in life. This essay sets out to explain why. After noting that outlooks like hedonism and stoicism fail to acknowledge love’s fundamental importance, the essay considers the variety of kinds of love, and argues that any love that involves caring deeply and personally about something for its own sake can have the relevant kind of importance. Specifically, love orients us in and roots us motivationally to the world in a way that self-interest does not. Consideration of how love would affect our attitude to Nozick’s experience machine reinforces this point.

One basis for an attraction to philosophy is an interest in finding answers to big questions about the human condition. Does life have a meaning? Are values objective? What are the limits of knowledge? Those of us who come to philosophy in this way tend to search and indeed hope for universal truths, but often we also have a skeptical bent, that makes us qualify if not totally dismiss every proposal that is offered.

Among the Big Questions that philosophers (and others!) ask, none are older (or, arguably, bigger) than questions about how to live. What are the ingredients of a good human life? Is there a single thing that is most important, that any good life must include? Given the enormous range of people’s abilities, tastes, and temperaments, and the relevance of culture in shaping human needs and values, there may be no truly universal and yet substantive answer to these questions that can stand the test of critical scrutiny. Still, philosophers, theologians, pop psychologists, and artists press on, offering slogans and maxims about a life well lived as well as more complex and academic theories of well-being. Among the multitude of candidates proposed as essential to a good life, one stands out for me as by far the most plausible: love. And, of course, it is proposed a lot: Songs, novels, movies, not to mention framed needlepoint pictures, proclaim that “Love makes the world go round”; “Love conquers all”; “All we need is love”; “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”

1. Love and Philosophical Theories of Well-Being

Common and plausible as this view of life is, however, if one looks at the history of Western philosophy (Eastern philosophy, too, judging from the little I know of it), it is remarkable how infrequently this sentiment is reflected. Over its history, philosophy has given love surprisingly little attention. The most dominant philosophical theories about what is important in life do not mention love at the fundamental level. To the extent that these theories assign love a place in their schemes, their accounts of love’s value are too contingent and instrumental to jibe with the attitude toward love that so many people have.

Hedonism, for example, identifies the fundamental source of value with pleasure and the absence of pain. According to hedonism, the more pleasure and less pain an individual life contains, the better it is. To the hedonist, then, the questions of whether and why love might be important and valuable depend for their answers on how love contributes to or detracts from the more ultimate aim of maximizing pleasure. Since love is in fact the source of a vast array of pleasures, hedonism has no difficulty giving love a very important and positive weight. Still, according to this view, love’s value is conditional. If a person—or a world—could be just as happy without love as with it, then love would serve no function, and its value would be nil. Further, love famously does not always add to our pleasure; it often detracts from it—not only when love is unrequited, but when one’s loved ones get sick or get fired, when they must be far away from us, and, of course, when they die. According to hedonism, when love increases pain, its value is worse than nothing. We would be better off without it. But that is precisely the opposite of the popular sentiment that it is my goal in this essay to better understand.

In contrast to hedonism stands another tradition, associated with the Stoics and with Kant, which identifies the best life not with pleasure but with virtue. According to this line of thought, if you live virtuously, in a way you can look back on with pride, then nothing can hurt you. On this view, love’s importance comes from the way in which it opens up opportunities for virtue. Since love really does generate opportunities for virtue, this theory, too, has no trouble crediting love with an important role in our lives. For example, love typically puts you in closer and more intimate contact with other people than you would otherwise have. It allows you to know better when certain people are in trouble and what they might need; and it may make it possible for them to receive comfort from you that they could not accept or enjoy from a stranger or acquaintance. Moreover, a virtue theorist might point out that in accepting love, one gives others an opportunity for virtue, and so there is a kind of virtue made possible not only in loving but also in being loved. Interestingly, the very aspects of love that a hedonist has a hard time making sense of as valuable—aspects that are called up when one’s beloved is suffering and in need—are those that the virtue theorist can most easily recognize as good.

Nonetheless, the account this theory provides of the value of love is no better than the hedonist’s. After all, even if love creates some opportunities for virtue that you would not otherwise have, there are plenty of opportunities available without it. You do not have to love an undernourished family in order to feed them, you do not have to love a wounded child in order to donate blood for her, you do not have to love a stranded motorist in order to help change his tire. Furthermore, just as love famously can be a source of pain as well as a source of pleasure, it can be a motive for vice as well as virtue. If love expands your opportunities to act well for the sake of your loved ones, it also tempts you to act badly in neglecting or even harming people whose needs or interests put them in competition with those you love. According to those who identify goodness with virtue, then, as well as those who identify goodness with pleasure, love’s importance is too contingent and conditional to satisfyingly explain the distinctive importance I and others take it to have.

2. The Basic Questions

What, then, (if anything) is so great about love? What makes love so special? One might think that before proceeding to address these questions, we ought to be clearer about what love is. The word “love” is used in myriad ways, to characterize relationships of an enormous variety—with friends, family, pets, one’s country. We talk sometimes of loving an activity, such as philosophy or basketball. (I live in North Carolina, where we talk about loving basketball quite a lot.) We are asked to love our enemies, our neighbors, or more generally our fellow human beings. Do we mean the same thing by “love” in all these instances? Is there anything they all have in common? Insofar as we entertain such thoughts as “love makes the world go around,” do we have one kind of relationship in particular in mind?

In a Wittgensteinian spirit, I take it that the inquiry into what love is that is important for our enterprise need not be a quest for an explicit definition that sets out necessary and sufficient conditions for “love,” but rather an exploration of the word’s many uses with an interest in seeing what, if anything, they all have in common, and what common strands link many of them together beyond that. Nor does it seem particularly fruitful to keep this inquiry separate from and prior to an exploration of the question of love’s importance that motivates it. In other words, rather than proceed by first asking and answering what love is, and only then moving on to ask why love might be special, it seems best to treat these questions as equal partners, to be explored together. To put it another way, we can approach the topic by asking what love can be, such that it is plausible to think of it as being a universal or near universal ingredient of a good life, and in virtue of what is love, so understood, so important. These, what might be called the basic questions about love, are the subject of this essay.

3. The Varieties of Love

What can love be, then, such that it is plausible to think of it as a deeply important feature of (almost) any good life? What can we mean by “love” when we so much as entertain the thought that it makes the world go round? I have said that it can be used to refer to myriad relationships. In fact, the term is used more broadly still, sometimes in a way that does not explicitly invoke relationships at all. Thus, it is sometimes said that God is love, though this has always struck me as mysterious. And hearts and people are sometimes described as full of love, even when they have no one to give it to or to share it with. (This use seems especially common in country music.) There is also a superficial use of “love,” as in “I love what you’ve done with your hair.” But I shall set these uses aside—they are not what I, nor, I think, what anyone has in mind when they ponder love’s importance in a life well lived. Rather, I shall simply assume that when people talk or write about love’s importance, what they have in mind, first and foremost, are loving relationships , and, typically, loving relationships with other human beings. Even within this narrowed range, however, the kinds of relationships that uncontroversially count as loving ones vary tremendously.

Thus, some people, when they talk abstractly about love, are thinking especially of romantic love, or perhaps of a kind of love that can be exemplified either by romantic love or close friendship. Others take family relations, especially the relation between parent and child, as their paradigm. Clearly, some of the things it makes sense to say of one kind of love relationship would be implausible and inappropriate when applied to another. It is a salient fact about loves of romance and of friendship that, in some sense, they are chosen. Something about the other person attracts you, and, if the love is reciprocal, something about you attracts them. Much of what is wonderful about such loves is connected to this feature. Falling in love tends to involve finding the person delightful, as well as admiring them, seeing them as good. And so the chance to be with them, even time spent thinking about them, is a source of intense pleasure. A further, often equally intense pleasure, comes from the perception that the person you love loves you back—“he chose me!” can be, among other things, an incredibly strong compliment, and an enormous boost to one’s self-esteem.

Love among family members is not typically like that. While it would be crazy for romantic love or love of a close friend not to be based on qualities of the loved ones to which the lover responds, it is chilling to imagine a parent whose attitude to her child waits upon finding out what the child is like, and pretty unpalatable to think of siblings relating to each other in this way, too. Parents of wanted children tend to stand ready to love them no matter what they are like. The thought that love is or should be unconditional comes most quickly to mind when thinking of relationships like this.

In important ways, these different kinds of loving relationship play different roles in our lives: they serve different functions, and address different needs. Insofar as one finds it plausible to think of love as an especially important and nearly universal value, is it one of these types of relationship rather than another that one has in mind? Alternatively, is there something these types of relationship have in common, in virtue of which they are all, in at least partly the same sense, instances of love? If so, can this plausibly be the feature that makes love—of any such kind—distinctively valuable?

I am attracted to the second answer, for at least two reasons. One is that it just seems false to me that a life without children, or a life without romance, is bound to be a less complete and successful life than one with such relationships. Even though children may be rewardingly at the center of life for many people, it does not take that much observation or imagination to see that a life can also be immensely successful and gratifying without them. The same goes for a life without a romantic partner. Philosophers, even more than most people, may have a tendency to project too much of their own needs and desires onto the rest of humanity, inclining them to make remarks like “a life without music (or access to nature or contemplation) is not worth living.” Though there may be universals or near universals like this—indeed, this essay is in part an inquiry into the plausibility of one of them—we should be cautious and circumspect in assessing and supporting them.

Second, although the character of loving relationships between lovers and friends, on the one hand, and siblings, parents, and children on the other, may well be markedly different in their early stages, they tend to grow more similar to each other over time, suggesting that they do have something valuable in common worth trying to articulate. Thus, although a new parent stands ready to love her child no matter what the child will turn out to be like, as the child develops and reveals her personality, the parent comes to be proud and appreciative of her, loving qualities in the child as well as the child herself. And the longer the relationship with a friend or romantic partner goes on, the freer one’s attachment tends to become from the characteristics that originally brought the lovers or friends together. It is frequently said that you can choose your friends, but you cannot choose your family. But, as one of my friends pointed out to me, it is not true—you cannot choose your friends either. At least much of the time, once you have your friends, you have them for life, even if, were you meeting them now you might not like them as much or have as much in common with them as you do with others in your community who do not happen to be your friends.

In some ways, then, love of friends and of family are importantly alike, and, I would suggest, importantly alike in value. Many of us have close friends and close family—both types of relationships play large, and sometimes competing, roles in our lives. But other people’s lives are more exclusively centered on family or on nonfamilial friends, and I see no reason to think one sort of life is in general more rewarding or meaningful or better than another. The contrast between a life without love and a life with it seems different. A life without love seems sad, empty, missing an important, possibly essential ingredient (for a good life) no matter what else it contains. It has a void that can only be filled by love, but what kind of love may not matter.

4. Defining Features of Love

But what is it about love, common to relationships of friendship, romance, and family, that make it so irreplaceable in a life well lived? To repeat the linked and basic questions we are exploring, what is love such that it is plausibly taken to be a universal ingredient of a good life, and in virtue of what is love so important?

In a brilliant and provocative article, 1 the philosopher David Velleman surveys what analytic philosophers have had to say about love, concluding that they, like Freud, tend to conceive of love as having a characteristic aim or aims. Of the many philosophers he quotes, Henry Sidgwick’s description is paradigmatic: after noting that love always involves a desire to do good to the object beloved, he adds, “it includes, besides the benevolent impulse, a desire of the society of the beloved.” 2 A similar view is echoed by Laurence Thomas, who writes, “love is feeling anchored in an intense and nonfleeting … desire to engage in mutual caring, sharing, and physical expression with the individual in question.” 3 William Lyons uses abstract variables to say the same thing: “For X to love Y, … X must not merely evaluate Y as appealing … , but X must want certain things in regard to Y as well. X must want to be with Y, to please Y, to cherish Y, to want Y to return the love, to want Y to think well of him.” 4 John Rawls, somewhat more cautiously, writes, “Love clearly has among its main elements the desire to advance the other person’s good as this person’s rational self-love would require.” 5

If these philosophers are right in thinking that love is or essentially includes desires to be with and to benefit the objects of one’s love, the answer to the question “What is so important about love?” may be connected to the desires that are so closely associated with it. Specifically, a proposal that suggests itself on this assumption is that love’s function is that it gives one something to do. Since loving someone supplies one with wishes and goals—to be with the beloved, to enhance his or her life—it gives an otherwise aimless person direction and purpose.

Velleman’s response to this litany of characterizations of love, however, is eye-opening: “In my opinion,” he writes, “the foregoing quotations express a sentimental fantasy…. In this fantasy, love necessarily entails a desire to ‘care and share,’ or to ‘benefit and be with’. But, surely,” Velleman goes on,

it is easy enough to love someone whom one cannot stand to be with. [Just think of] a troublemaking relation. [The] meddlesome aunt, cranky grandfather, smothering parent, or overcompetitive sibling is dearly loved, … : one just has no desire for his or her company. The same ambivalence can occur in the most intimate relationships. When divorcing couples tell their children that they still love one another but cannot live together, they are telling not a white lie but a dark truth. In the presence of such everyday examples, the notion that loving someone entails wanting to be with him seems fantastic indeed. There is only slightly more realism, in the suggestion that loving someone entails being moved to do him good. In this case, the authors quoted above seem to be thinking of a blissful family in which caring about others necessarily coincides with caring for them or taking care of them…. yet when I think of [many of the] people I love—parents, brothers, friends, … —I do not think of myself as an agent of their interests. I would of course do them a favor if asked, but in the absence of some such occasion for benefiting them, I have no continuing or recurring desire to do so. At the thought of a close friend, my heart doesn’t fill with an urge to do something for him, though it may indeed fill with love.

Indeed, Velleman goes on to suggest,

In most contexts, a love that is inseparable from the urge to benefit is an unhealthy love, bristling with uncalled-for impingements. Love becomes equally unhealthy if too closely allied with some of the other desires mentioned in these passages—the desire to please or to be well-thought—of, and so on. Of course, there are occasions for pleasing and impressing the people one loves, just as there are occasions for caring and sharing. But 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. 6

Velleman may be going too far, but his remarks are a useful antidote to our tendency to identify love with its most rewarding instances, and, even more to the point, with its most active expressions. By focusing too much on certain paradigms, we forget the equal validity of other cases. In any event, I find Velleman’s claim that love ought not to be conceived as a bundle of desires persuasive. For a person whose children are grown and self-sufficient, whose parents are cared for, whose friends live far away, there may be nothing to do or even sensibly to want to do to benefit his loved ones. Still, he has loved ones, and that he has them enhances his life in an important way, even if under the circumstances, the loving relationships operate mainly in the background. But in what way?

Unfortunately, Velleman’s positive characterization of love seems to me as skewed and as unsatisfactory as the view he criticizes. Having found reason to question the assumption “that love is essentially a pro-attitude toward a result,” he suggests, “love is … an attitude toward the beloved himself but not toward any result at all” (354). Rather, he suggests, love is “an arresting awareness of (a person’s) value” (360), an appreciation, as it were, of a person’s rational nature (see 365) that somehow “arrests our tendencies toward emotional self-protection” “disarm[ing] our emotional defenses [and] mak[ing] us vulnerable to the other” (361).

Velleman defends his view of love, in part, on phenomenological grounds. Comparing his view to the one he has criticized, he writes, “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” (360). Reading this, one wonders whether Velleman has forgotten about his meddlesome aunt and his overcompetitive brother. And does he really feel amazement and awe for his children (or anything similar) when he is stuck on the New Jersey Turnpike in Thanksgiving traffic and they are fighting with each other in the back seat? Just as Velleman’s opponents focus too much on the circumstances in which love for another allows or even calls for active participation in the other’s life, Velleman concentrates too narrowly on cases at the other end of the spectrum, when circumstances allow one to simply stop and contemplate one’s beloved. Moreover, and even despite warning against it, Velleman, like his adversaries, seems to be thinking only of love of people one also enjoys or admires, leaving aside the challenge of accommodating those relationships which, even though they are loving, are also temporarily or permanently annoying, frustrating, and difficult.

It is not surprising that when one takes seriously the search for a feature or features all loving relationships share—keeping in mind the variety that ranges not only from sweethearts to siblings but also from soul mates to meddlesome aunts—one will not find much. Indeed, I find only one such feature, that may seem almost too obvious to mention. Specifically, loving someone always involves caring about the person for his or her own sake. That is, when one loves someone, one wants his good. One wants him to flourish, if flourishing is an option. Moreover, one wants this at least in part unselfishly, that is, for the beloved’s own sake, and independently of whether his flourishing or his continued existence contributes to one’s own. 7

This is not to say that love is necessarily or even typically disinterested—though love always involves caring about the other for her own sake, it frequently also includes a desire for a (certain kind of) relationship with the beloved, and if that relationship is denied—a lover is spurned, a friend is betrayed—the love might not unreasonably be withdrawn. Nor do I mean to offer this feature as a complete definition of love. Though it seems to me love always involves caring about the loved one for her own sake, one might care about someone for her own sake in a way that we would not want to identify with love. Certainly, a general attitude of good will to all men, or to all people, or to all of sentient creation, falls short of what I mean by love. Such an attitude may be too casual or too slight to really count as a form of caring at all. But even a robust and disinterested concern for humanity may be motivated by duty or some other sense of what is called for that seems intuitively different from love. When you love someone, your attachment is not only deep; it is personal in a way that other forms of caring about something or someone for its own sake are not. Who and what I love says something about me that distinguishes me from other people. In loving someone or something, I declare a commitment to it that is different from the commitment I have and expect others to have of impersonal values.

Most of us, of course, love only a (relatively) few people, and in loving them rather than others we reflect and reveal something about who we particularly are. Indeed, it is sometimes said that who and what we love defines us; our loves are closely bound up with and partly constitutive of our identities. It seems to me that something of this personal character exists even in the case of love that is less selective: a person who genuinely loves all of humanity, for example, has an attachment and concern for others that is different from that of even the most conscientiously benevolent people who are motivated by moral principle.

There may be no more to be said, at so general a level, about the wide range of relationships that we call love than that love involves caring, deeply and personally, about the objects of love for their own sakes. Obvious and abstract as this generalization is, though, it can explain why the two more striking proposals that we considered and rejected were at least plausible candidates for a characterization of love.

Though loving someone need not in general involve a desire actively to benefit her, the disposition to benefit, to comfort, to help the loved one if she needs it follows directly from the fact that you care about her good. If one’s grown children neither want nor need one’s help—they are doing perfectly well on their own, thank you very much—a good parent’s love may rightly express itself simply in her rejoicing in her children’s well-being and accomplishment and nothing more. Similarly, there may be nothing to do or to want to do in relation to a beloved but far away friend whose life is full and going well without your assistance. But if one’s loved one is in trouble and one is in a position to help, one will necessarily be moved to relieve her distress. Thus, even if Velleman is right that love as such is not to be identified with a set of aims, the disposition to acquire such aims under appropriate conditions is inseparable from the attitude of deep caring that is fundamental to love.

Velleman’s own proposal to understand love as “an arresting awareness of [a person’s] value” seems to me similarly connected to the attitude of deep caring. It is commonly recognized that caring for someone for her own sake means that her good is directly a good for you; her pleasures, as it were, are your pleasures; her pains are your pains. But caring involves something more than this, that the characterization just given does not make explicit—namely, that one embraces the emotional vulnerability that this characterization describes. One can imagine one’s pleasure or pain being tied to that of another unwillingly, like an unwanted addiction. One might see one’s emotional attachment to another person as a sickness or a curse. But such an attitude would be in tension with caring about the other for her own sake; it would be incompatible with wholehearted love. If one genuinely cares about the other person, in other words, one not only feels pleasure at her well-being, it seems right to one that one should do so: one takes her existence and her flourishing to be good in itself. That is, one values the beloved; one regards her life (or her memory, if she is dead) as worth preserving and protecting. We may express this by saying that when one loves someone, one values the beloved as an end in herself. That is, her existence and her good are a part of one’s system of ends, which one takes to provide reasons as well as motives for action independently of their effect on one’s own happiness. 8 And this has implications. Specifically, even though valuing someone does not necessarily involve focusing on her status as valuable—and so it does not require that one actually have “an arrested awareness of the beloved’s value,” it does seem to imply that one is prepared to see her as valuable if circumstances call for one to focus on her in that way.

This explains how one can genuinely love one’s children even as they are whining in the backseat, how it can be true that one loves one’s meddlesome aunt even if one anticipates her upcoming visit with less than wholehearted enthusiasm. Even during periods when you do not like the people you love very much, you continue to value them. And though your valuing them may remain in the background for much of the time, when circumstances call for you to focus on your loved ones in a certain way, you stand ready to see and appreciate their value.

Loving, then, is, fundamentally, caring, deeply and personally, for a person for her own sake. It is this attitude toward the beloved that underlies both the desires to benefit and be with her and the admiring and appreciative images of her that the other philosophers I have mentioned have been tempted to identify with love. Love is, if you will, an orientation in the world , that shapes our responses to the shifting circumstances in which we and our loved ones find ourselves. In some situations, it makes us think about people in a certain way; in others, it inspires us to action. Is it this feature of love that makes love so distinctively and exceptionally valuable?

5. The Distinctive Importance of Love

I suspect that it is, and I suspect further that the reason it is, to put it as succinctly as possible, is that caring deeply and personally for another person or persons for their own sakes roots us, motivationally, to the world. Let me explain.

Part of what I mean in saying that love roots us motivationally to the world is simply that love gives us reasons to live. That is, it gives us reasons to get up in the morning, to go to work, to feed ourselves, to face another day. Often these reasons include the fact that by living we can help the people we love, we can contribute to their welfare—we can raise our children, care for our parents, or just “be there” for our spouses and friends. In addition, we have reason to want simply to share the world with our loved ones 9 —to spend time with them in joint activity and conversation, and sometimes just to observe as their lives go along on their own tracks.

In this respect, love contrasts with other kinds of valuing. Thus, as I mentioned before, it seems to me that there are ways in which one may care, even care quite a lot, about others for their own sake, which most of us would not classify as cases of love. While I was working on the first draft of this essay, a catastrophic earthquake in Haiti occurred, and thousands of people responded immediately and energetically with offers of help and donations of money, of food, and of physical assistance. As with previous natural as well as some unnatural disasters, it tempered the sorrow and the horror of the tragic events to see the gratifying display of people caring, and acting to express their care for their fellow human beings for their own sakes. But such care, though genuine, does not amount to love, at least for most of us, and this is reflected in the fact that (again, for most of us) the chance to help those who desperately need it around the world, to be ready when the next earthquake or tsunami or hurricane hits, does not provide us with a reason to get up in the morning. Our commitments to justice, to honesty, to morality more generally, occupy similar places in our motivational systems. As inhabitants of the earth and members of the human community, most of us are committed to doing our share to respect if not to improve the world of which we are a part. But that commitment does not give us reasons to be in the world. They only come into play because we are here—and motivated to continue to be here—anyway. 10 Arguably, the fact that love is different from duty or other kinds of disinterested valuing in this respect may constitute an objection to the Stoic view of the good life I mentioned earlier in this essay, according to which the best life is a life of virtue. Even if one agrees that a virtuous life is unilaterally better than a less virtuous one, if it does not provide you with a reason to live, how good can it be? If the theory is meant to capture the ingredients of a fully successful life, of a life well lived, then something seems missing from it—and love will fill the bill.

6. Two Objections Considered

But is love the only thing that will fill the bill? It would have to be if, as I am suggesting, the fact that love “roots us motivationally to the world” is what makes love special. Two objections to this claim spring to mind, however, almost as soon as I express this suggestion.

The first is that my presentation of love’s motivational power seems to presume that, were it not for loved ones in our lives, the day-to-day business of living would be for us nothing but a series of arduous chores. It is sad but true that many people are in precisely that situation: they have mind-numbing or back-breaking jobs; they battle daily with physical pain and discomfort; and they have little or no prospect of their circumstances improving. For a significant portion of such people, it may be the love of their friends and family that keeps them going and that makes their lives worthwhile. But many of us—most of those reading this essay, I expect—are luckier than that. We have plenty of reasons to get up in the morning that have nothing to do with our loved ones. We do not need a reason to drag ourselves to work, because we love our work. Or because we love the courses we are taking, the books we are reading, the research we are doing. Or, we may love other things in our lives—our daily walks, our cello practice, the tennis matches we play, the lectures and performances we attend.

Understood one way, this is an objection I am happy to accept. It brings out a need to modify my proposal, but in a way that preserves its intended spirit. If what is meant by the idea that one loves one’s work or one’s hobby or the woods outside one’s house is that these activities or their associated objects are, for one, ends in themselves, whose existence and flourishing one cares about for their own sake, then granting this objection does not show that love is not special in rooting us motivationally to the world. Rather, it shows that love need not be restricted to love of other people. We may love philosophy, or music, or the Great Smoky Mountains as well. In these cases, too, when we love, we care deeply and personally about something for its own sake.

It is true that ordinarily when we say or approve of the thought that love makes the world go round, it is interpersonal love that we have in mind, and empirically it is likely that this is the most common and the deepest type of love people tend to have. But I see no harm in admitting the possibility of extending the range of loves to other possible objects.

There is another way of understanding this objection, however, for a different, and perhaps even more common, way to understand someone who says that he loves his work (or philosophy or the mountains) is that he very much enjoys it and that, because of this, going to work (or reading philosophy or hiking) is a pleasure and a good for him . This is related to the second objection to my proposal—namely, why is self -love not enough to root us motivationally to the world? Having good friends and family is great, one might say, and most of us would be much less happy than we are if we did not have them, but that does not mean that in their absence we would be suicidal. People have strong survival instincts, indeed strong drives not just for bare survival but for success in whatever form they happen to conceive it. Do these drives not provide them with reason enough to get up and face another day? Do these not suffice to root most of us motivationally to the world?

Now, one might think that I could respond to this objection in the same way I responded to the first—by suggesting that these challenges only serve to show that the kind of love we are interested in should be extended yet again, not just to include love of activities and objects other than people but also to include love of self. To concede this, however, would violate the spirit of the familiar saying to such an extent as to deprive it of its point. To someone who includes self-love in the love that she understands as making the world go around, at least if self-love is understood to be roughly equivalent to a healthy self-interest, it would be appropriate to ask, “As opposed to what?” To put it another way, the familiar adage that love makes the world go round is most sensibly understood as making a claim about love that is meant to set love’s power apart from the pervasive force of self-interest. At any rate, that is the sense of the adage that I have been concerned to defend.

My proposal then is that love—meaning love of others—roots us motivationally to the world in a way that self-interest fails to do. But, as the objection we are considering rightly notes, love is not the only thing that motivates people to get up in the morning or that gives them a reason to live. Most people also want to live for their own sakes, and for the sake of satisfying their self-interested desires.

Responding to this objection gives me an opportunity to explain further what I mean in saying that love (love of others, that is) roots us motivationally to the world. In making this claim, rather than the simpler and more straightforward claim that love has the power to motivate period , I mean to indicate something nontrivial about different possible attitudes to the world. Specifically, it seems to me that when one loves someone (or something) other than oneself, one has a reason to care about the world that is different in kind from the reasons one has if one cares only about oneself. For the world—the real world, I want to say, for emphasis, and to contrast it with a fantasy world—is the place, the only possible place, in which you and your loved one can meet—it is the plane of existence you share with the object of your love, and it is the only place where your loved one can flourish. So if you love someone you have a stake in the world, in being in and in appropriate touch with the world; you have a reason therefore to care, not only about the ones you love but about the world in which they and you both live.

Now, a critic might object that you would have reason to care about the world even if you care only about yourself. For you live in the world, too—where else would you live? And you had better pay attention to it if you want to go on living. No matter what reason you have to get out of bed in the morning that bed is in the world (the real world, as I put it) and if you are not in proper touch with it, you might fall getting out of it and break your neck. You had better see the real world train that is rushing at you so that you know to jump out of the way; you had better find some real world food with which to nourish yourself; and so on. The interest one must have in the world in these latter examples, however, is purely instrumental. If someone else took care of your safety and sustenance for you, it would be just as well.

7. The Experience Machine

The point I am trying to make can be reinforced by reflecting on a thought experiment, introduced to the philosophical world by Robert Nozick in 1974. 11 Nozick asked us to imagine “an experience machine”—a science fictional contraption one can hook oneself up to that would induce in us all the thoughts and feelings that conform to whatever life we think would be the best possible for us. If one wanted to be a movie star, an Olympic athlete, a Nobel Prize winner, the experience machine would give you the experience of being one. If you wanted to climb Mount Everest, bask on the beach, or sip a fine aged Burgundy wine, the machine would give you the sensations that the best version of these activities would involve. The point of the imaginative exercise comes in asking oneself whether, if one had such a machine available and had perfect confidence in its not breaking down, one would choose to hook oneself up to it and live happily, albeit, delusionally, ever after.

Not everyone answers the question the same way. Some people react by saying “Where do I sign up?” Others are appalled at the idea. To me the answer all depends (or at least, depends most cogently) on love.

From a purely egoistic perspective, the experience machine has evident attractions. At least, it would assure you more net happiness and less net suffering than you are likely to achieve if you live life “the hard way.” But if there are loved ones in your life, that is apt to give you a decisive reason not to plug yourself in. For the experience machine would deprive you of your loved ones—you would never be able to see them or talk to them, to comfort or be comforted by them, again. You could have simulated experiences of love, but they would involve figments of your or of the machine’s imagination. Your actual spouse or parent or child or best friend would be forever lost to you.

The reasons love gives you not to plug into the experience machine are reflective of a kind of attachment to the world that one has, and that one has reason to have if one loves someone else, and that, I suggest, one does not have if there is nothing and no one outside of yourself whom you love. This is what I mean when I suggest that love (of another) gives you a stake in the world, and roots you, motivationally to it.

The point, which is reinforced by contemplation of the experience machine, is that although love and self-interest may both motivate you to get up in the morning, and provide you with reasons to live, they give you different reasons, with implications that go well beyond the self-evident ones that self-interest moves you to pursue your own good while love moves you to pursue the good of the beloved. In saying that love gives you a stake in the world, I mean to point out that if you love, you have a reason to be interested in the world, a reason why what happens in the world matters to you. Thus, whereas self-interest gives you reasons that move you to get up in the morning so as to experience the world, love gives you reasons that move you to connect to the world and to act on and within it. Perhaps this is part of what people mean to express by the idea that love makes the world go round—love, and not virtue, love and not the pursuit of individual happiness. Moreover, if this is what they mean by the adage, they would be right.

Frankfurt, Harry.   The Reasons of Love . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004 .

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Lyons, William.   Emotion . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980 .

Nozick, Robert.   Anarchy, State, and Utopia . New York: Basic Books, 1974 .

Rawls, John.   A Theory of Justice . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971 .

Sidgwick, Henry.   The Methods of Ethics . Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981 .

Thomas, Laurence. “Reasons for Loving.” In The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love , edited by Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins , 467–476. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991 .

Velleman, J. David. “ Love as a Moral Emotion. ” Ethics 109 (January 1999): 338–374.

Williams, Bernard.   Moral Luck . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981 .

1 J. David Velleman , “Love as a Moral Emotion,” Ethics 109 (January 1999), 338–374 .

2 Henry Sidgwick , The Methods of Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 244 .

3 Laurence Thomas , “Reasons for Loving,” in The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love , ed. Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991), 470 .

4 William Lyons , Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 64 .

5 John Rawls , A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 190 . See also 487.

Velleman, “Love as a Moral Emotion,” 353.

7 In this respect and many others, my view is like Harry Frankfurt’s. See Frankfurt , The Reasons of Love (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 42 .

See again Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love , 42.

As the Elton John song says, “How wonderful life is with you in the world.”

10 Bernard Williams introduces the concept of a categorical desire to refer to desires that are not conditional on one’s being alive and which can serve to give one reason to stay alive (in his terms, they “propel one forward” in life) in Williams , Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 11 . In these terms, my point may be put by saying that love is distinctive in essentially involving or giving rise to categorical desires.

11 Robert Nozick , Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 42–45 .

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