Love: gloriously amoral and arational

Abstract

I argue that an evaluational conception of love collides with the way we value love. That way allows that love has causes, but not reasons, and it recognizes and celebrates a love that refuses to justify itself. Love has unjustified selectivity, due to its arbitrary causes. That imposes a non-tradability norm. A love for reasons, rational love or evaluational love would be propositional, and it therefore allows that the people we love are tradable commodities. A moralized conception of love is no less committed to treating those we love as tradable commodities; it is just that they are tradable moral commodities. An evaluative criterion of adequacy, I suggest, encourages the opposite view – a non-rational and non-evaluational concept of love. Such a love can set up partial obligations, which may even demand that one sacrifice one's life. Only a love that has causes but not reasons can have the kind of value that we think love has, and thus it would only be rational to pursue and foster such a love.

Keywords:

• love
• reasons
• rationality
• causes
• emotion
• morality

Acknowledgements

This paper was originally written for a conference in Canberra on the work of David Velleman. It was re-presented at a conference on love in Leuven and also at the universities of Bergen and Miami. Many thanks to Jeanette Kennett for comments and discussion, and the audiences at these occasions for questions and discussion.