Love: self-propagation,self-preservation,or ekstasis?

My title refers to three accounts of interpersonal love: the rationalist (and ultimately rational egoist) account that Terence Irwin ascribes to Plato; the anti-rationalist but strikingly similar account that Harry Frankfurt endorses in his own voice; and the ‘ekstatic’ account that I – following the lead of Martha Nussbaum – find in Plato's Phaedrus. My claim is that the ekstatic account points to important features of interpersonal love to which the other accounts fail to do justice, especially reciprocity and a regulative ideal of equality.     

With a Sword Pointing to the East,West, South,and North

In his In Defense of War, Nigel Biggar argues for an account of war based in Christian love. In the process, he opposes Christian pacifists, the British Left, liberal accounts of just‐war, and accounts of just‐war based on self‐defense. Although framed in terms of love, his account pivots around punishment, which is further explicated by a thorough review of the recent war in Iraq, the invasion of which he deems justified. This review compares Biggar's monograph to prior iterations of a love‐based approach to just war by Paul Ramsey and Oliver O'Donovan. Biggar's contributions regarding love, punishment, and policy analysis are recognized, as well as his attempt to carry on the tradition of the ‘mournful warrior’. As a model for the kind of scrutiny that Christian ethicists should bring to bear on serious social issues, Biggar's monograph is excellent. However, the political stance and – largely implicit and unstated – political theology operating behind this book are, in the end, disconcerting.     

Subject‐Relative Reasons for Love

Can love be an appropriate response to a person? In this paper, I argue that it can. First, I discuss the reasons why we might think this question should be answered in the negative. This will help us clarify the question itself. Then I argue that, even though extant accounts of reasons for love are inadequate, there remains the suspicion that there must be something about people which make our love for them appropriate. Being lovable, I contend, is what makes our love for them appropriate, just as being fearsome is what makes our fear of certain situations appropriate. I finally propose a general account of this property which avoids the major problems facing the extant accounts of reasons for love.     

In Defense of Trait‐Based Love

It is widely believed that a person's 1 traits can function as reasons for loving her. (Many a metropolitan rag, for instance, carries lonely hearts ads that attest to this belief with their laundry lists of coveted characteristics.) Notable contemporary work in the philosophy of love has taken the rejection of this premise as its point of departure. As far as I can tell, none of that work has engaged with a careful philosophical exposition of the view under discussion. In the following pages, I will defend the idea of trait‐based love against three of its critics and one of its advocates. I will discuss work on this topic by Harry Frankfurt, Niko Kolodny and David Velleman, arguing that their criticisms fail and that the alternatives they offer to trait‐based love create more difficulties than they solve. What these authors have in common is a deflationary approach to love that reduces it to a beneficent disposition, a valuing relationship and a visceral form of moral regard, respectively. I will compare these to the multiplex, nuanced depiction of trait‐based love in Plato's Symposium. While it is plausible that love can motivate a beneficent disposition, develop in relationships and entails moral regard, I will argue that the attempt to reduce it to any of the foregoing fails. Frankfurt, Kolodny and Velleman reject trait‐based love in part because they think it would differ in unacceptable ways from the love most of us practice. Plato advocates the cultivation of a love that in some respects resembles the picture of trait‐based love the contemporary authors balk at. However, unlike those critics, he appreciates that trait‐based love need not resemble the ideal he proposes. His richer view of love accounts for elements such as need and feeling that the contemporary thinkers are driven to implausibly bracket as distractions. As I will try to show, the most compelling criticisms of Platonic love do not tell against its responsiveness to the loved one's traits. I will argue that trait‐based love is consistent with an intuitive picture of love and that this commonsense approach is more defensible than competing views in these texts. These authors' disagreements about what can count as reasons for love are bound up with the differences in what each takes love to be. Thus, in the course of arguing for trait‐based love, I will critically assess their various proposals as to the nature of love.     

GRIEF: A NARRATIVE ACCOUNT

Grief is not a kind of feeling, or a kind of judgement, or a kind of perception, or any kind of mental state or event the identity of which can be adequately captured at a moment in time. Instead, grief is a kind of process; more specifically, it is a complex pattern of activity and passivity, inner and outer, which unfolds over time, and the unfolding pattern over time is explanatorily prior to what is the case at any particular time. The pattern of a particular grieving is best understood and explained through a narrative account, and not merely through a causal account, for narrative accounts in such cases have powerful explanatory, revelatory, and expressive powers which causal accounts lack. Although I will not argue for it here, I believe that this view of grief can be generalised to other kinds of emotion. If this is so, then many philosophical accounts of emotion are at fault in identifying emotion with a kind of mental state or event.     

The Intend/Foresee Distinction and the Problem of “Closeness”

The distinction between harm that is intended as a means or end, and harm that is merely a foreseen side-effect of one’s action, is widely cited as a significant factor in a variety of ethical contexts. Many use it, for example, to distinguish terrorist acts from certain acts of war that may have similar results as side-effects. Yet Bennett and others have argued that its application is so arbitrary that if it can be used to cast certain harmful actions in a more favorable light, then it can equally be manipulated to do the same for any kind of harmful action. In response, some have tried to block such extensions of the intend/foresee distinction by rejecting its application in cases where the relation between the plainly intended means and the harm is “too close”. This move, however, has been attacked as vague and obscure, and Bennett has argued that all the plausible candidates for explicating the idea of excessive closeness ultimately fail. In this paper, I develop and defend an account of excessive closeness with the aim of rescuing the intend/foresee distinction from such charges of arbitrariness. The account is based on the distinction between merely causal and constitutive relations among states of affairs, and I show both how it escapes Bennett’s objections to other accounts and how it applies to a variety of cases. Finally, I also examine Quinn’s alternative move of shifting the focus of the intend/foresee distinction in an attempt to sidestep the issue of closeness, and argue that it is not ultimately successful. In fact, Quinn’s view has shortcomings that can be resolved only by returning to an appeal to some notion of closeness, underscoring the need for the sort of account I offer.     

Why Maximize Expected Choice-Worthiness?1

This paper argues in favor of a particular account of decision-making under normative uncertainty: that, when it is possible to do so, one should maximize expected choice-worthiness. Though this position has been often suggested in the literature and is often taken to be the ‘default’ view, it has so far received little in the way of positive argument in its favor. After dealing with some preliminaries and giving the basic motivation for taking normative uncertainty into account in our decision-making, we consider and provide new arguments against two rival accounts that have been offered—the accounts that we call ‘My Favorite Theory’ and ‘My Favorite Option’. We then give a novel argument for comparativism—the view that, under normative uncertainty, one should take into account both probabilities of different theories and magnitudes of choice-worthiness. Finally, we further argue in favor of maximizing expected choice-worthiness and consider and respond to five objections.     

‘The Extremely Difficult Realization That Something Other Than Oneself Is Real’: Iris Murdoch on Love and Moral Agency

Abstract: In the last few years, there has been a revival of interest in the philosophy of Iris Murdoch. Despite this revival, however, certain aspects of Murdoch's views remain poorly understood, including her account of a concept that she famously described as ‘central’ to moral philosophy—i.e., love. In this paper, I argue that the concept of love is essential to any adequate understanding of Murdoch's work but that recent attempts by Kieran Setiya and David Velleman to assimilate Murdoch's account of love to neo‐Aristotelian or neo‐Kantian theories of moral agency are misconceived. We will not understand what Murdoch is trying to do unless we understand her position as a radical alternative to such theories. Here, I present a reading of Murdoch's account of love as a form of Platonic eros directed toward two objects: the Good and the particular individual. It is in navigating the tension between these two objects that we find ourselves facing what Murdoch famously described as ‘the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real’. When properly understood, Murdoch's account of love opens up conceptual space for an alternative approach to some of the central questions in contemporary moral theory.     

Healthy Conflict in an Era of Intractability

The essay responds to four critical essays by Rosemary Kellison, Ebrahim Moosa, Joseph Winters, and Martin Kavka on the author’s recent book, Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society: From Enemy to Adversary (2018). Parts 1 and 2 work in tandem to further develop my accounts of strategic empathy and agonistic political friendship. I defend these accounts against criticisms that my argument for moral imagination obligates oppressed people to empathize with their oppressors. I argue, further, that healthy conflict can be motivated by a kind of “secular” love. This enables my position to immanently critique and mediate the claims that one must either love (agapically) one’s opponent in order to engage them in “healthy conflict,” on one hand, or that one must vanquish, exclude, or “cancel” one’s opponent, on the other. In Part 3, I demonstrate how my account mediates the challenge of an alleged standing opposition between moral imagination and socio-theoretical critique. I defend a methodologically pragmatist account of immanent prophetic criticism, resistance, and conflict transformation. Finally, I respond to one critic’s vindication of a strong enemy/adversary opposition that takes up the case of white supremacist violence in the U.S. I argue that the time horizon for healthy conflict must be simultaneously immediate and also long-term, provided that such engagements remain socio-critically self-reflexive and seek to cultivate transformational responses.     

Thinking About a Word—Love,for Example

What is it we do when we philosophize about a word? How are we to act as we ask the philosophical question par excellence, “What is … ?” These questions are addressed here with particular focus on Troy Jollimore's Love's Vision and contemporary theories of love. Jollimore's rationalist account of love, based on a specific understanding of “reasons for love,” illustrates a particular philosophical mistake: When we think about a word, we are prone to believe that even though “the sense of the word” that we investigate may be up for grabs, the other words we use when we do these investigations are not. Jollimore's exploration of love is guided by specific conceptions of “reasons” and “rationality” that remain unquestioned. The article argues that we may have to rethink a great number of words as we embark on the task of uncovering the sense of one word.     

Historicism,Entrenchment, and Conventionalism

W. V. Quine famously argues that though all knowledge is empirical, mathematics is entrenched relative to physics and the special sciences. Further, entrenchment accounts for the necessity of mathematics relative to these other disciplines. Michael Friedman challenges Quine’s view by appealing to historicism, the thesis that the nature of science is illuminated by taking into account its historical development. Friedman argues on historicist grounds that mathematical claims serve as principles constitutive of languages within which empirical claims in physics and the special sciences can be formulated and tested, where these mathematical claims are themselves not empirical but conventional. For Friedman, their conventional, constitutive status accounts for the necessity of mathematics relative to these other disciplines. Here I evaluate Friedman’s challenge to Quine and Quine’s likely response. I then show that though we have reason to find Friedman’s challenge successful, his positive project requires further development before we can endorse it.     

Problems for factive accounts of assertion

The knowledge account of assertion construes assertion as subject to constitutive norms. In its standard version, it combines a wide scope obligation not to assert p without knowing p, with narrow scope principles specifying conditions under which it is permissible to assert p, where the notions of obligation and permission are duals and behave uniformly for variable p. It is argued that, given natural assumptions about the logic of ‘ought’, the account proves incoherent. The argument generalizes to accounts that substitute other factive notions for knowledge. A recent non-standard version of the knowledge account employs proposition-relative norms and circumvents the problem. However, it still leads to intolerable combinations of verdicts. Again, the problem arises because knowledge is factive, and it generalizes to other factive notions. It is shown that non-factive accounts face none of the diagnosed difficulties and can do much of the explanatory work that the knowledge account is alleged to do.     

Second-personal reasons: why we need something like them,but why there are actually no such things

Abstract

Stephen Darwall, in his book The Second-Person Standpoint (2006), has argued for an account of morality grounded in what he calls second-personal reasons. My first aim in this paper is to demonstrate the value of an account like Darwall’s; as I read it, it responds to the need for an account of morality as ‘intrinsic’ to the person. However, I go on to argue, as my second aim in this paper, that Darwall’s account is ultimately unsuccessful. I hope to achieve these aims by contrasting Darwall’s second-personal account with two other accounts, Hobbes’ and the neo-Kantians’. In the first case, I aim to show that Darwall’s account meets a need that the other accounts don’t in virtue of its differences from the other accounts; and in the second case, I aim to show that Darwall’s account ultimately fails in virtue of its residual similarities to at least one of them.     

In defence of a faith-like model of love: a reply to John Lippitt’s “Kierkegaard and the problem of special relationships: Ferreira,Krishek, and the ‘God filter”’

In his major work on love, Works of Love, Kierkegaard clearly and robustly affirms the moral superiority of neighbourly love, and approves preferential love on one condition: that it serve as an instance of neighbourly love. But can an essentially preferential love be an instance of the essentially non-preferential neighbourly love? John Lippitt seems to think it can. In his paper “Kierkegaard and the problem of special relationships: Ferreira, Krishek, and the ‘God filter”’ he defends Kierkegaard’s position in Works of Love against my criticism (as presented in my book Kierkegaard on Faith and Love); specifically, against my claim that in using Kierkegaard’s view of neighbourly love as a framework for understanding preferential love, one fails to account for the latter’s distinctive character. Lippitt claims that I misinterpret Kierkegaard’s position and, using what he calls ‘the God filter’, he attempts to show how adhering to Kierkegaard’s view of neighbourly love allows one to sustain the distinctiveness (and value) of preferential love. In what follows I will defend my interpretation of Kierkegaard’s position and explain why I take the view he presents in Works of Love to be problematic. Furthermore, in my aforementioned book I offer a Kierkegaardian model of love that does precisely what Lippitt seeks his ‘God filter’ model to do: namely, preserve the distinctiveness of preferential love while allowing its possible coexistence with neighbourly love. Thus, against the background of Lippitt’s criticism I will demonstrate this model again, in hope of clarifying the advantages this view offers.     

Wolterstorff on Love and Justice

In Justice in Love, Nicholas Wolterstorff argues for a unique ethical orientation called “care‐agapism.” He offers it as an alternative to theories of benevolence‐agapism found in Christian ethics on the one hand and to the philosophical orientations of egoism, utilitarianism, and eudaimonism on the other. The purported uniqueness and superiority of his theory lies in its ability to account for the conceptual compatibility of love and justice while also positively incorporating self‐love. Yet in attempting to articulate a “bestowed worth” account of human dignity—in which dignity is given by divine love and respected in acts of justice—Wolterstorff leans on an unstable characterization of how love and the good are conceptually interwoven. As a result, his reader cannot be sure about the theoretical superiority of care‐agapism. Moreover, Wolterstorff's attempt to value self‐love and at the same time reject eudaimonism depends on a dubious interpretation of Augustine carried over from Justice: Rights and Wrongs, which itself further depends on a mischaracterization of the possible varieties of eudaimonism. This mistake is unfortunate because, on a closer reading of Augustine, one finds an agapistic account of eudaimonism that could have significantly helped Wolterstorff's overall account of the complementary relation of love and justice.     

Social Construction and Achieving Reference1

One influential view is that at least some putatively natural human kinds are actually social constructions, understood as some real kind of thing that is produced or sustained by our social and conceptual practices. Category constructionists share two commitments: they hold that human category terms like “race” (and racial terms) and “sex” (and sexual terms) and “homosexuality” and “perversion” actually refer to constructed categories, and they hold that these categories are widely but mistakenly taken to be natural kinds. But it is far from clear that these two commitments are consistent. The sort of mismatch between belief and underlying nature constructionists’ suppose is often taken to indicate a failure of reference. Reliance on a causal‐historical account of reference allows the preservation of reference, but unfortunately, constructionists' appropriation of causal historical accounts of reference is beset by difficulties that do not attend natural kind theorists’ appeals to such accounts. Here, I set out these difficulties, but argue that they can be answered, allowing terms for apparently natural human kinds refer to some sort of social construction about which there is massive error.     

Tender Mercies: Love,Oatmeal, and the Quest for Wholeness

Tender Mercies (1983) is a simple and quiet film that reveals a complexity in its depiction of the many forms love can assume in the soul. Using some of C. G. Jung's and Robert Johnson's observations on the dynamic nature of love, the article tracks the plot of Horton Foote's award-winning screenplay as it unfolds the qualities of love, beginning with romantic love, the most popular form our current culture depicts and promotes, as well as perhaps less glamorous and outwardly exciting forms that nonetheless ground the soul in fuller, more sustainable relations between couples, father and daughter, father and son, as well as the deep passion for what excites and sustains us as creative persons. It also touches on the infernal form of addiction as a kind of fixed and fixated love that harbors no freedom for the individual; an addiction is understood as pornographic to the extent that it continues to promise what it cannot ever deliver, so the individual is always hooked by its fury. By looking closely at various scenes from the film, the author articulates the slow retrieval of one soul from addiction to a life full, whole, and satisfying in its creative and familial love.     

Two Second‐Personal Conceptions of the Dignity of Persons

In spite of the burgeoning philosophical literature on human dignity, Stephen Darwall's second‐personal account of the dignity of persons has not received the attention it deserves. This article investigates Darwall's account and argues that it faces a dilemma, for it succumbs either to a problem of antecedence or to the wrong kind of reasons problem. But this need not mean one should reject a second‐personal account. Instead, I argue that an alternative second‐personal conception, one I will call relational, promises to solve the dilemma by avoiding both the problem of antecedence and the wrong kind of reasons problem. More generally, distinguishing these two second‐personal conceptions of the dignity of persons is important to enrich the available philosophical accounts of human dignity.     

The Goldilocks Problem of the specificity of visual phenomenal content

Existentialist accounts maintain that visual phenomenal content takes the logical form of an existentially quantified sentence. These accounts do not make phenomenal content specific enough. Singularist accounts posit a singular content in which the seen object is a constituent. These accounts make phenomenal content too specific. My account gets the specificity of visual phenomenal content just right. My account begins with John Searle's suggestion that visual experience represents an object as seen, moves this relation outside the scope of the existential quantifier and then replaces it with the relation of objects being ‘present as accessible’, as described by Alva Noë.