Love as valuing a relationship

Philosophical Review 112 (2):135-189 (2003)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

At first glance, love seems to be a psychological state for which there are normative reasons: a state that, if all goes well, is an appropriate or fitting response to something independent of itself. Love for one’s parent, child, or friend is fitting, one wants to say, if anything is. On reflection, however, it is elusive what reasons for love might be. It is natural to assume that they would be nonrelational features of the person one loves, something about her in her own right. According to the “quality theory,” for example, reasons for love are the beloved’s personal attributes, such as her wit and beauty. In J. David Velleman’s provocative and ingeniously argued proposal, the reason for love is the beloved’s bare Kantian personhood, her capacity for rational choice and valuation.1 But no such nonrelational feature works. To appreciate just one difficulty, observe that whatever nonrelational feature one selects as the reason for love will be one that another person could, or actually does, possess. The claim that nonrelational features are reasons for love implies, absurdly, that insofar as one’s love for Jane is responsive to its reasons, it will accept any relevantly similar person as a replacement

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 101,505

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Autonomy and the Demands of Love.Mark Piper - 2015 - IAFOR Journal of Ethics, Religion and Philosophy 2 (1):30–39.
The Rationality of Love.Hichem Naar - 2022 - Oxford University Press.
The Focus of Love.Sharon Krishek - 2021 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (7):508-522.
Pruss on the Requirement of Universal Love.Mark C. Murphy - 2015 - Roczniki Filozoficzne 63 (3):21-30.
Love, Reasons, and Desire.Nicholas Drake - 2020 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (3):591-605.
The duplication of love's reasons.Tony Milligan - 2013 - Philosophical Explorations 16 (3):315 - 323.
Love As If.John Shand - 2011 - Essays in Philosophy 12 (1):4-17.

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
1,295 (#13,668)

6 months
75 (#81,533)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Niko Kolodny
University of California, Berkeley

Citations of this work

Is love an emotion?Arina Pismenny & Jesse Prinz - 2024 - In Christopher Grau & Aaron Smuts (eds.), "Introduction" for the Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Love. NYC: Oxford University Press.
Why Yellow Fever Isn't Flattering: A Case Against Racial Fetishes.Robin Zheng - 2016 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 2 (3):400-419.
Loneliness and the Emotional Experience of Absence.Tom Roberts & Joel Krueger - 2020 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 59 (2):185-204.

View all 205 citations / Add more citations

References found in this work

Truth, invention, and the meaning of life.David Wiggins - 1988 - In Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (ed.), Essays on moral realism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. pp. 127--65.
Sexual perversion.Thomas Nagel - 1969 - Journal of Philosophy 66 (1):5-17.
Three conceptions of rational agency.R. Jay Wallace - 1999 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 2 (3):217-242.
The justification of national partiality.Thomas Hurka - 1997 - In Robert McKim (ed.), The Morality of Nationalism. Oup Usa. pp. 139-57.

View all 8 references / Add more references