Abstract

We are interestingly ambivalent about romantic love, in a number of cases. Consider a man who abuses his wife, but is also passionate about her and easily distraught at the thought of losing her. There is some sense in which he loves her, but another in which he absolutely does not. Consider, too, a longtime partner who feels she has rather suddenly “fallen out of love” with the person to whom she was once devoted. She continues to feel there is some sense in which she loves this person, but another in which she does not. And again, many people seem to both believe in love at first sight and think that the only true lovers are those whose feelings have withstood the tests of time and difficulty. In this paper, I propose that Kant’s conception of human feeling, desire, and motivation provides an unusually compelling account—both of ambiguous cases of romantic love and of love more generally. This proposal is not as shocking as it would have been 30 years ago, but I suspect it is still surprising to many, whom have been persuaded at most that there is room in Kant’s moral theory for feeling to play a positive supportive role in moral motivation; my proposal here is that Kant’s broader vision of human motivation—moral and nonmoral—tightly fits the phenomenon of love and, perhaps, emotions in general