Ethics of Love and Ethics of Family

Ethics of Love

“Don't let the word love define your LOVE”

Love is the most powerful emotion a human being can experience. The strange
think is, that almost nobody knows what love is. Why is it so difficult to find love?
That is easy to understand, if you know that the word "love" is not the same as
one's feeling of love.

What is Love?

Since antiquity, Love is one of core concerns for philosophers. Thanks to Plato, through
his Symposium, this question has acquired its letters of nobility. Love in a general sense,
can be defined as an expansion of the heart toward another human being.

General Definitions:

 Latin: amor: love, intense desire

 Philosophy, Psychology: inclination toward one person or even an object
considered good
 Love is the Moral opposite tendency to selfishness

Specific definitions:

 Plato: “Any general aspiration towards the good things and to happiness,
that’s the Love”
 Tolstoy: “Love has always based on the renunciation of individual property”
 Descartes: “L” Love is a passion that can arise in us without in any way we
could see if the object that causes it is good or bad ”
 Spinoza: “Love is nothing but a joy accompanied by an external cause”
 Schopenhauer: “Love is a trap for men to perpetuate the species”

1. Preliminary Distinctions

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

o I love chocolate (or skiing).

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

However, what is meant by ‘love’ differs from case to case. May be understood as meaning
merely that I like this thing or activity very much. In 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

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so what makes my life worth living; I might just as well say that I value these. By contrast,
and 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 to be, roughly, a matter of caring
about another person as the person she is, for her own sake. (Accordingly, 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; such personal love will be the focus here.

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.

2. Love as Union

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).

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),

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.

4.1 Love as Appraisal of Value

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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. 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.

4.2 Love as Bestowal of Value

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.

4.3 An Intermediate Position?

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
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(insofar as through one’s attention and committed appreciation of these properties they
come to have special significance for one).

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).

5.1 Love as Emotion Proper

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).

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5.2 Love as Emotion Complex

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.

6. The Value and Justification of Love

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.

Can love be ethical?

Certainly, we fall in love not because it is the right thing to do, but because it feels right.

Romantic feelings and emotions arise with no control. Of course, we do have control over
them—we can choose whether we want to let them grow or push them back. Nevertheless,
we cannot choose our feelings.

In that sense, to me love itself seems to be another form of ethic. In moralityas well as in
love, radical freedom is required. As Kant remarked, if we were obliged to behave properly,
no actual choice would be left to us, and without choice no moral action would actually exist.
It would be just imitation or obedience. Similarly, in love, if I were obliged to love someone,
then that love would certainly not be real.

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In both cases, fear seems to be what restrains us from living that kind of freedom. We decide
to stick to a set of rules because hopefully other people will do the same as us, and
coexistence will be easier.

Yet, what would happen if we overcame that fear and were left completely free, what would
we chose as the actual compass for our deeds? How would we manage the tides of feelings
and desires that we happen to experience?

References:

https://www.the-philosophy.com/definition-love-philosophy

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/love/

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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