LOVE’S LUCK-KNOT

Abstract

Pamela Anderson argues for liberating love and vulnerability from the myths of the Western philosophical imaginary that tie them to fragility, subjection, and dependency. Spurred by Judith Butler’s work, Anderson finds herself challenged to rethink her ontological assumptions, away from the Kantian conception of the self as morally and ontologically invulnerable. In (partial) support of Anderson’s agenda, I distinguish different contrastive pairs of concepts of vulnerability, and argue for the relevance of ontological vulnerability, showing that in a Kantian framework this is the root of shared agency. I argue that this – largely unexplored – Kantian claim converges with and sustains Anderson’s general plan to reassess the positive value of vulnerability in relation to mutual accountability. The ontological concept of vulnerability makes the finitude and interdependency of human agency apparent. In this context, love vulnerability can be appreciated and valued as a distinctive drive to cooperative interaction and shared agency, which allows finite and limited agents to deal and cope with the predicaments of contingency. Focusing on the dynamic and reciprocal permeability distinctive of love, I defend the claim that vulnerability to love is not the source of burdens and constraints but a key capacity that shapes human identity, drives and expands agency, and sustains relations of mutual accountability.

Keywords:

• Pamela Anderson
• love
• vulnerability
• accountability
• Kant

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See, for example, Pamela Sue Anderson, “Arguing for ‘Ethical’ Vulnerability: Towards a Politics of Care?” in Exploring Vulnerability, eds. Heike Springhart and Günter Thomas (Göttingen and Bristol, CT: Vandenhoeck, 2017) 147–62; “Creating a New Imaginary for Love in Religion,” ed. Paul S. Fiddes, in Love and Vulnerability: Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson, ed. Pelagia Goulimari, Spec. issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 25.1–2 (2020): 46–53; “Towards a New Philosophical Imaginary,” eds. Sabina Lovibond and A.W. Moore, in Love and Vulnerability: Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson 8–22; “Love and Vulnerability: Two Love Commandments and One God,” available <https://loveinreligionorg.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/anderson-love-and-vulnerability-amended-title-9-1-18.pdf> (accessed 8 Dec. 2019).

2 Pamela Anderson, “Arguing for ‘Ethical’ Vulnerability” 147; see also Kristine Culp, “Vulnerability and the Susceptibility to Transformation” in Exploring Vulnerability 59–70. Anderson draws also on Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005) 460; “Ethics and Human Capability: A Response” in Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought, eds. John Wall, William Schweiker, and David Hall (New York and London: Routledge, 2002) 280, 282, 284.

3 See Carla Bagnoli, “Autonomy, Emotional Vulnerability and the Dynamics of Power,” Women Philosophers on Autonomy, eds. Sandrine Berges and Alberto L. Siani (London: Routledge, 2018) 208–25.

4 Judith Butler, Precarious Life (London: Verso, 2004) 23, 21–23, 28–29, 51, 128.

5 Anderson, “Arguing for ‘Ethical’ Vulnerability” 157.

6 Anderson, “Towards a New Philosophical Imaginary” 10.

7 Anderson, “Arguing for ‘Ethical’ Vulnerability” 162.

8 See Susan Dodds, Catriona Mackenzie, and Wendy Rogers, “Introduction: What is Vulnerability and Why Does it Matter for Moral Theory?” in Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, eds. Susan Dodds, Catriona Mackenzie, and Wendy Rogers (New York: Oxford UP, 2014) 4–10.

9 Anderson aims to show that the concepts of autonomy and vulnerability, properly understood and spelled out, are entangled; see “Arguing for ‘Ethical’ Vulnerability.” See also Catriona Mackenzie, “The Importance of Relational Autonomy and Capabilities for an Ethics of Vulnerability” in Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy.

10 “Towards a New Philosophical Imaginary” 11.

11 On the distinction between the ontological and the ethical conceptions of vulnerability, see Anderson, “Arguing for ‘Ethical’ Vulnerability” 161. Compare Dodds, Mackenzie, and Rogers (“Introduction”), who distinguish three concepts of vulnerability: inherent, situational, and pathogenic. What I call “ontological vulnerability” corresponds to what they call “inherent vulnerability,” while “circumstantial vulnerability” includes both situational (non-pathogenic) and pathogenic aspects of vulnerability. I introduced the contrastive pair constitutive/circumstantial vulnerability in order to stress the analogy with the pair constitutive/circumstantial luck, which belongs in a debate whose main concerns overlap with those central in my account of vulnerability, as argued at length in “Vulnerability and the Incompleteness of Practical Reason” in Vulnerability and Applied Ethics, ed. Christine Strahele (London: Routledge, 2016) 13–32. For an alternative account of the role of vulnerability in Kant’s ethics, see Paul Formosa, “The Role of Vulnerability in Kantian Ethics” in Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy.

12 Anderson, “Arguing for ‘Ethical’ Vulnerability” 161.

13 On the differences between the constraining function of respect and the transformative effect of love, see Carla Bagnoli, “Autonomy, Emotional Vulnerability and the Dynamics of Power.” One way to cast the difference relevant in the present discussion is to focus on the standard of proof. For Kant, the standard of proof for morality is the experience of respect, which testifies to the impact of reasoning on our mind, and its efficacy in determining action. For Murdoch, instead, the standard of proof is love. She holds that the transformative power of love allows us to engage with reality and recognize others as they are, independently of our projections and strategic interactions with them. See Carla Bagnoli, “Constrained by Reason, Transformed by Love: Kant and Murdoch on the Standard of Proof” in Truth and Love, ed. Gary Browning (Heidelberg: Springer, 2018) 63–88; Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (London: Chatto, 1997) 215.

14 Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics 216, 331. By dissociating emotions and the self, pathological feelings and morality, the intellectualist model deprives us of resources for bringing about significant changes in vision.

15 The self is nothing but a reflexive structure, which fits a distinctive conception of public reason, and a public conception of autonomy; see Carla Bagnoli, “Kant in Metaethics: The Paradox of Autonomy, Solved by Publicity” in The Palgrave Kant Handbook, ed. Matthew C. Altman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) 355–77.

16 Again, this is not without reason, and it has some points of merit, which are best highlighted in contrast to two prominent views of agency, namely, consequentialist and behaviourist views. Murdoch’s description of moral transformation ensued by loving attention aims to represent a mode of moral activity that is decidedly alternative to the behaviourist conception of action. Nonetheless, the sphere of agency remains marginal and under-investigated.

17 Murdoch mistakenly treats Kant’s conception of action as akin to behaviourism. She conflates Kant’s own conception with the Kantian conceptions underlying her contemporary Kantian theories, such as Richard M. Hare’s or Stuart Hampshire’s. See Carla Bagnoli, “Constrained by Reason, Transformed by Love” 72 ff.

18 Kant, C1 A738/B766. References to Kant’s works refer to the Prussian Academy edition and are given using the following abbreviations: C1 Critique of Pure Reason; C2 Critique of Practical Reason; MM Metaphysics of Morals.

19 Kant, MM 6: 465, 389, 379; C2 5: 42, 151–57.

20 Amélie Rorty speaks of love as “dynamically permeable” in that each of the lovers profoundly shapes each other by loving. Lovers affect one another in ways that “tend to ramify through a person’s character”; see her “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love is Not Love Which Alters Not When it Alteration Finds” in Friendship: A Philosophical Reader, ed. N.K. Badhwar (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993) 73–88 (77).

21 Judith Shklar, The Faces of Injustice (New Haven: Yale UP, 1990) 9; see also Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984).

22 Alison Jaggar and Theresa W. Tobin hold that moral justification might be different in an unjust world; see their “Moral Justification in an Unjust World” in The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy, eds. Ann Garry, Serene J. Khader, and Alison Stone (New York: Routledge, 2017) 501–14.

23 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1971). Rawls’ claim is that we should have completed an ideal vision of what are the normative standards to address one another in reasoning in order to understand how to correct what does not work in non-ideal conditions.

24 Anderson seems undecided on this point. Some remarks suggest that she does not renounce the primacy of political standards: “I am not yet clear whether a politics of care can preserve or achieve this ethical accountability, without some form of justice as our primary political standard” (“Arguing for ‘Ethical’ Vulnerability” 149).

25 Anderson importantly remarks that in some cases (e.g., cases of intimate violence or “core intimacy wounds”) the duty to forgive is a highly contentious matter. Pamela Sue Anderson, “When Justice and Forgiveness Come Apart: A Feminist Perspective on Restorative Justice and Intimate Violence,” Oxford Journal of Law and Religion 5.1 (2016): 113–34. Compare Lucy Allis, “Wiping the Slate Clean: The Heart of Forgiveness,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 36.1 (2008): 33–68; Margaret Urban Walker, “Moral Vulnerability and the Task of Reparations” in Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy 110–33.