Handout for: Love As Valuing A Relationship

Thesis: One’s reasons for loving another is one’s relationship to the ongoing history that one shares with him or her.

One does not decide to love on the basis of considering reasons, and one should not be blamed for loving or fail- ing to love. This much follows from the fact that one cannot decide to love at all. Love is nonvoluntary.6 But it does not follow that there can-
not be normative reasons for love, that love cannot be assessed as appropriate or inappropriate to its object. (Pg 4)

“love consists, in part, in believing that one’s relationship is a reason for action.”

Advantages

Avoids Substitution Problem

Identifies distinctive reasons for love

Three reasons to think reasons for love.
1. First, from the first-person perspective of someone who loves, the constitutive emotions and motivations of love make reflexive sense. (Pg 3)
2. Second, from the third-person perspective of an adviser or critic, we often find love or its absence inappropriate. (Pg 3)
3. Third, it is plausible that love consists in certain kinds of psychological states, and there may be reasons to believe that states of those kinds are, in general, responses to reasons. (Pg 3)

Three problems

One is not in a friendship or romantic relationship unless one has non-
instrumental concern for the other person and this concern is recipro-
cated.

The reason why friendship and romantic love, in particular, are vulnerable to the loss of
respect has something to do with the fact that friendship and romantic love involve viewing one’s friend or lover as someone with equal standing.(Pg 31)

Love and friendship, insofar as they are responsive to their reasons, are
resilient to changes in the personal qualities, such as beauty and wit,
that initially made the prospect of certain activities with that person
appealing. This is because to love someone is to view her as more than
simply an accomplice in those activities. (Pg 33)

The reasons for the noninstrumental concern that first establishes
friendships are therefore much like the reasons for the noninstrumen-
tal concern that characterizes already established friendships. In both
cases, the reasons are, in part, backward looking—a response to a past
pattern of interaction—and, in part, forward looking—a response to
the prospect of continuing or developing that pattern. (Pg 35)

Attraction to a person often is a reason to pursue and sustain the relevant kind of inter-
action with that person, and attraction to a person often is partly constitutive of the relevant kind of interaction. (Pg. 38)

“This seems clear enough with sexual attraction. You not only recognize that the person has certain charms, as one might in a mood of disinterested appraisal, but also view his or her charms as (not to put too fine a point on it) making sex with him or her seem appealing.” (Pg. 38)

In sum, the relationship theory may appear to succeed in finding a place for partiality within practical reason only by undermining its claim to be part of morality.

Insistent Vs Non-insistent

Quality Theory:

According to the quality theory, the features that constitute reasons for loving a person are that person’s lovable qualities, such as beauty, wit, or vivacity. (pg 4)

Advantages:

First, one is typically attracted to particular people as potential lovers in response to such qualities.(pg 4)

Second, love involves a disposition to appreciate certain personal qualities of one’s beloved.(pg 4)

Disadvantages

No-Reason Theory (Frankfurt)
Advantages
Disadvantages

Velleman’s Theory

Love, in his view, is the “optional maximum response to one and the same value” to which Kantian respect is the “required minimum” response (366), namely, the value of a person as a “rational nature” or “capacity of appreciation or valuation—a capacity to care about things in that reflective way which is distinctive of self-conscious creatures like us” (365). (pg 39)

On his view, specific qualities of particular people, which serve as “expression[s] or symbol[s] or reminders of [their] value as [people]” (371), lead us to recognize their rational nature, and this recognition, in turn, “arrests our tendencies toward emotional
self-protection from [them], tendencies to draw ourselves in and close ourselves off from being affected by [them]” (361). In sum, love is an emotional vulnerability produced by an arresting awareness of rational personhood, an awareness that is produced by an appreciation of specific personal qualities. (Pg 39)


Advantages

responds to the “focus” objection to the quality theory. (pg 39)

He explicitly warns against over intellectualizing the rational nature that one comes to value, as well as the way in which one recognizes its expression in empirical qualities. (pg 40)

Disadvantages

the etiology of familial [,friendship and romantic] love entailed by Velleman’s account is implausible. (pg 40)

It is mysterious, for example, how someone’s “gait” might be “an expression or symbol or reminder of his value as a person” (371). It seems more a reflection of his physiology or unreflective habit than of anything to do with choice or valuation. (Pg 40)

Suggestions of this kind [i.e warning about over-intellectualizing would not suffice to explain why some apprehensions of expressions of rational nature “arrest” our emotional defenses, whereas others do not. (Pg 41)

How can Velleman claim that it is appropriate to love only some people and not others, in light of the fact that all people share the rational nature that is supposed to make love appropriate? (pg 41)

It does not follow that loving some people and not others is ever an appropriate response to the rational nature that all of them have. (Pg. 42)

Even if Velleman accepts the undefended principle that:

“whenever one cannot equally distribute scarce, indivisible
resources among several people, an appropriate response to the ratio-
nal nature that all of those people possess is to allocate, by means of a
suitably arbitrary procedure, the resources only to some and, of neces-
sity, not to others.” (pg 43)

Then

“he would still fail to explain why loving certain people in particular is an appropriate response, whereas loving others may not be. This is the main shortcoming of his account. Velleman gives a causal explanation of how, in fact, one comes to love certain people and not others, but not a normative reason for loving them and not others.” (pg 43)

the problem is not simply that one ought to love certain people in particular, but also that one ought to love those people in particular ways. (Pg 45-Problem of Modes)