draft date: 8/26/2013

Is it Better to Love Better Things? Aaron Smuts

Abstract It seems better to love virtue than vice, pleasure than pain, good than evil. Perhaps it's also better to love virtuous people than vicious people. But at the same time, it's repugnant to suggest that a mother should love her smarter, more athletic, better looking son than his dim, clumsy, ordinary brother. My task is to help sort out the conflicting intuitions about what we should love. In particular, I want to address a problem for the no-reasons view, the theory that love cannot be rationally justified. Since it seems better to love good people rather than evil villains, it appears that there are indeed reasons for (or, at least, against) love. Is it coherent to talk this way and deny that love can be justified? I think so and will explain how.

1 Introduction Is it better to love better things? This question is multiply ambiguous. There are at least three variables: (1) What kind of better do we have in mind? Prudential, moral, aesthetic, or some other kind of better, such as more meaningful? (2) What do we mean by love? Do we simply mean liking, or are we asking about something more robust, such as care or romantic love? (3) And what kinds of things are we talking about? Ideals, artifacts, places, pets, or people? From these three variables and the limited lists of suggested options we can generate (4 kinds of better * 3 kinds of love * 5 kinds of objects =) 60 different questions. And we should probably consider the second "better" as a fourth variable, making matters worse. Perhaps the answers are different for every question. It seem clearly better to care about ideals in proportion to their importance. But when it comes to people, the situation is not so clear. For example, it is far from clear that parents 1

The Frankfurt / Wolf Exchange

should love their children in proportion to their merits. It's not possible to address all these different questions here. To keep the scope manageable, we need to reform the general question into something more specific. I will make two of the variables concrete, the kind of love and the kind of object. Here I intend to answer the question "Is it better to love (in a robust sense that I will explain) better people?" I will try to get clear about the kind of better at issue as we proceed. Truth in advertising: I won't be offering a fully satisfactory answer to the question. I will try to get a little clearer about the ways it might be better to love better people. And I will attempt to show how this claim is compatible with the no-reasons view of love — the view that love cannot be justified. In short: the reasons it is better to love better people are not the kind of reasons that can justify love. To begin, I will show that some of the answers to general question in the contemporary literature are wrong.

2 The Frankfurt / Wolf Exchange As a way into the issue, I want to take a brief look at one of the only places I know of in the contemporary philosophical literature that addresses the general question — a recent exchange between Harry Frankfurt and Susan Wolf.1 Their debate exhibits a few instructive mistakes. By exposing these problems, hopefully, we'll be able to do better. The subtitle of Wolf's contribution, "The True, The Good, and the Loveable: Frankfurt's Avoidance of Objectivity," makes her charge against Frankfurt clear. She argues that Frankfurt defends an implausible theory of care. The key problem with the theory is that it fails to properly account for the significance of the objective value of what we care about, what I will call the cared-for.2 The theory she targets holds that the worth of cared-for is irrelevant; all that matters is that we do indeed care about something. According to this view, the worth of the object is incidental, if not down right irrelevant. This is an extreme view. It suggests that it is senseless to ask "Should I care about X?" But, most plausibly, it is not.3 1

Frankfurt (2002) and Wolf (2002). Noddings (2003) introduces this terminology. 3 Here, we must be careful to think of this should as an evaluative should, not as an obligatory should. We have limited control over what we care about. And since, most plausibly, ought implies can, it's not clear that we should say that we ought or ought not care about X. But we can say that it would be 2

2

The Frankfurt / Wolf Exchange

Call the view that the worth of the object is unimportant, the subjective view (TSV). Wolf attributes TSV to Frankfurt. TSV seems to answer "no" to just about all of the 60 questions that we could generate. It answer yes to just one slightly different question: TSV holds that it is prudentially better to love better things if what makes them better is that they make us better. But that's tautological. And its not what we were asking. As a matter of interpretive accuracy, one might object that it is not entirely clear that Frankfurt holds TSV, although he does indeed invite this interpretation. Near the end of "On Caring" (in section 10) he argues: "It is therefore always a good reason for loving something that we find it loveable, meaning by this not that we regard it as especially worthy of love but just that we are capable of loving it."4 But, notice the qualification "a good reason." He doesn't say that this is the only reason or the ultimate reason. He doesn't say that explicitly. At times he seems to deny such an extreme claim. Earlier in the same essay (in section 7) he says: The significance to us of caring is thus more basic than the importance to us of what we care about. Needless to say, it is better for us to care about what is truly worth caring about than it is to care about things that are inconsequential or otherwise unworthy or that will bring us harm. However, the value to us of the fact that we care about various things does not derive simply from the value of the suitability of the objects about which we care. Caring is important to us for its own sake.5 (italics mine)

Here it should be clear that Frankfurt is primarily concerned with the prudential value of caring, with how good it is for the one caring to care. He thinks that it is simply good for us to care. Apparently he doesn't think that that this is all that matters, as he makes passing reference to worthiness and plugs in a "simply" at one point. But that's all. Notice the focus on "us" in the italicized phrases in the passage above. He spends the bulk of his thirty-five page essay focused on the prudential value of caring about objects regardless of their worth; he clearly thinks that the prudential considerations are most important.6 As we will see, his reply good, better, worse, or bad to care about X. That makes perfect sense. See Schroeder (2011) for a discussion of the distinction. 4 Frankfurt (1999, p.179). 5 Frankfurt (1999, p.162). 6 Frankfurt's work is riddled with ambiguous, non-committal meta-ethical 3

The Frankfurt / Wolf Exchange

to Wolf makes this obvious. There, he is entirely concerned with welfare. And given this focus, it is fair to saddle Frankfurt with TSV, or something much like it. Regardless of whether TSV is Frankfurt's view, Wolf thinks that it is extremely problematic. To see the problem, she asks us to consider the kind of claim that we hear from parents of apathetic children: "I just wish he cared about something." Or: "I wish he was interested in doing something. I don't care what." But we know better than to take this at face value. No parent would be overjoyed to find that their previously apathetic child was now obsessed with creating the biggest booger sculpture ever made. We don't want our kids to care about just anything; no, we want them to care about things that have value, things that are worth caring about. From this observation we can construct a rival theory, what Wolf refers to as "the opposite view," or what, to be more precise, we can call the objective view (TOV): care should be proportional to the worth of the cared-for. We should care more about things that are more valuable.7 This is a crude formulation, but it will suffice. Although TOV helps account for some of our intuitions, Wolf thinks that it is unacceptable. If we assume that people vary in worth, TOV has a troubling implication, namely, it seems to imply that a mother should care about her smart, healthy, kind, and good looking child more than his somewhat dim, sickly, less kind, and ordinary brother. Few will follow TOV here. This implication is nasty. So something must be wrong with TOV or the claim that people vary in worth. In addition, although Wolf doesn't note the problem, regardless of whether we think that people vary in worth, TOV implies that we should be inhumanly impartial, loving all children as much as our own.8 The statements. Some find this frustrating. To the unsympathetic, he seems to want to have his cake and eat it to — to talk like a nihilist, but presuppose realism. In his reply to Wolf, he appears to accept nihilism or at least some kind of radical skepticism; "efforts to make sense of 'objective value' tend to turn out badly" (2002, p.250). At other times he seems to presuppose that some things are indeed better than others. 7 Hurka (2001) provides a plausible defense of something similar to TOV. And we find similar views of virtue elsewhere. MacIntyre (1982) defends an Aristotelian version of this claim: the virtuous person cares for the right things, at the right time, and to the right degree. Roberts (1991) argues that a person's character is a function of their cares. 8 See Oldenquist (1982) and Cottingham (1983 and 1986) for devastating criticisms of this kind of impartialism. Hurka (1997 and 2006) attempts to 4

The Frankfurt / Wolf Exchange

problem is more pronounced if we think that all people are equal: it implies that we should love everyone equally. Hence, TOV has highly counter-intuitive implications. In response to the first problem, Wolf carves out an intermediate position. We can call it the hybrid view (THV). Her position incorporates the objective worth of the cared-for and two other factors, one of which is subjective. Together, all three determine what we should care about. In addition to the worth of the object, following Frankfurt, she argues that affinity matters — that our personal tastes matter. There is not much sense in trying to care about something that leaves us cold. To some extent, we should care about what we can care about. But not everything is worthy of care. In addition to worth and affinity, Wolf argues that the instrumental value of caring is also important. We should care about what will lead to greater benefits for us and for others. Hence, fitting somewhere in between the extremes of TSV and TOV, THV holds that love should be proportioned according to (1) the value of the object, (2) one's particular affinities, and (3) the instrumental value of loving that object. She offers two reasons in support of THV. The first concerns truth. Although to care is not simply to believe that the cared-for is valuable, what we care about tends to appear valuable. This appearance fosters evaluative beliefs. So, if we want to have correct evaluative beliefs, to be safe we should care about what is indeed valuable. The second reason is more compelling. It concerns meaning. Wolf argues that what makes a life meaningful is the active engagement in projects of worth. To put the idea in her favored slogan form: meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness.9 Hence, it is better to care about better things because doing so makes our lives more meaningful. In response to Wolf's criticism, Frankfurt once again defends the prudential value of caring about anything at all, regardless of its worth. But his objection simply talks past Wolf, as she never doubted the prudential value of caring about worthless things. That wasn't the basis of her objection. In his reply, Frankfurt sees nothing other than welfare as relevant. In fact he seems to assume some kind of crude, sophomoric form of rational egoism — the ridiculous theory that we only have reason to do what enhances our own welfare: "What reason would he [Hitler]

solve this problem by appealing to agent-relative value; our own children are indeed more valuable from our point of view. Schroeder (2007) gives us reason to be suspicious of this kind of move. 9 Wolf (2002 and 2010a) develops this theory of meaning. 5

Loving and Liking

have, after all, to care about something that makes no important difference to him?"10 What reason would Hitler have to call of the final solution if it didn't benefit him to do so? Well, Frankfurt, maybe it was the right thing to do! Let's put Frankfurt's fruitless reply aside. Here, we need only note that their discussion reveals something important: If we are to make any progress on the issue at hand, we need to get clear about the kind of better at issue. Frankfurt and Wolf operate with different evaluative standards. Frankfurt is concerned with welfare (or prudential value), whereas, Wolf is concerned with truthfulness and meaning. In what follows, we need to keep these clear. Although Frankfurt's reply misses its target, Wolf's theory is not without serious problems. When it comes to ideals and practices, THV might be right, but not when it comes to people. Not according to her own criteria. Wolf's position has the same rebarbative implication as TOV. An athletic father of two might have a greater affinity for his sporty child with whom he will certainly have more fun at the park. We can assume that the two children are of equal worth, but on Wolf's theory this doesn't mean that the father should love both equally. Since he has a greater affinity for the athletic son, and (let's assume) their time together will be more instrumentally valuable, her theory implies that he should love the athletic child more. Hence, THV has the same problematic implication as TOV. If we reject TOV for this reason, we should also reject THV. It appears that we are no closer to reconciling the conflicting intuitions than we were when we began. So where does this leave us? I suggest that we take a step back and restrict the discussion to the love of people, not ideals and practices. I'd also like to get a bit clearer about the evaluation of attitudes and about the nature of love and its justification. And, then, I'd like to return to the plausibility of the claim that it is better to love better people. As that point we'll be better equipped to determine whether or not factors such as prudential value, truthfulness, and meaning really do give us reason to love our beloveds.

3 Loving and Liking In the discussion above, I moved between talk of caring and talk of loving. For present purposes, this is likely fine. But we also used the 10

Frankfurt (2002, p.248). 6

Loving and Liking

same terms to apply to ideals and people. This leads to problems. Having seen the problems Wolf's theory encounters by moving between the two, I suggest that we restrict the discussion to persons and try to get a bit clearer about the nature of love. That said, it is somewhat problematic to restrict the topic to persons, construed as cognitively competent humans. If we ignore important instances of love, we will likely cultivate a deformed theory reared on an imbalanced diet of examples. Although many philosophers are comfortable denying that we can love animals, this seems preposterous to all but those sheltering some pet theory of love.11 People care for their pets, spend huge amounts of money on them, and grieve when they die.12 To deny that someone grieving for their dead cat loves their pet is wildly counter-intuitive and horribly insensitive.13 For those not blinkered by a commitment to a benighted theory, it is easy to see that love for persons and for pets is of the same general kind. They pass the joke test for synonymy. There is nothing funny about this sentence: "I love my wife and my child more than anything." Nor is there anything funny about this sentence: "Before she had her first child, she loved her cat more than anything." But there is something funny going on here: "Before I met my wife, I loved fried chicken more than anything."14 The last sentence fails the joke test. It is funny. The joke test reveals an equivocation that shows us something important about love. The sentence equivocates on "love." The kind of love that one feels for one's wife is not at all like what one means when one says "I love fried chicken." When someone says that they love fried chicken, they merely 11

Shoemaker (2003. p.93 n.13) and Frankfurt (1999c, p.160-161) deny that animals can care. Frankfurt goes so far as to deny that animals can be happy (1999c, p.158). Jaworska (2007a and 2007b) agrees that animals cannot care, with the possible exception of some great apes (2007b, p.495). Caring, she argues, requires that one possess the concept of importance. Seidman (2009 and 2010) adds a further cognitive condition to caring that it seems animals cannot meet. Noddings (2003, pp. 148 and 159) denies that pets can care about their owners. For similar reasons, she would likely deny that they care about their young. 12 A similar argument can be run in support of the surprisingly controversial claim that animals can love. They, too, grieve! Milligan (2011, pp.124-136), Rowlands (2013, pp.8-14), and Smuts (manuscript-b) argue in support of the view that animals can care. 13 Helm (2009b, p.45). Kolodny (2003, p.187,n.2) goes so far as to deny that children can love. Loving requires beliefs. And beliefs, he thinks, require the concept of truth, a concept children lack. Nuts! 14 Green (1997, pp.210 and 224) introduced fried chicken into the love literature. 7

Loving and Liking

mean that they like it a lot. But this is not what someone means when they say that they love their cat. Hence, the kind of love at issue is not merely the love of persons. It is broader. Just how to set the boundaries, though, is far from clear. Some people really do seem to love their cars. And this does not appear to be a metaphor.15 One suggestion that might help us distinguish loving from liking a lot, is this: we can only love what we perceive to have a good. This does not commit us to saying that cars have welfare. Most plausibly only sentient creatures for whom things matter have welfare in a nonmetaphorical sense.16 But other things such as plants and cars nonmetaphorically have goods. Perhaps these are best described in perfectionist terms.17 It is unclear. In any case, all that my suggestion requires is that the lover see the beloved as having a good. I did not say that the lover must be right. This perception is important because in order for an attitude to be love it must involve a non-self-interested concern for the beloved. Or to put it more precisely, one must, at least in part, care for the beloved for her own sake.18

Love the Attitude and Loving Relationships Before we proceed, a further point of clarification is in order: We must be careful to distinguish the attitude, or what we might somewhat misleadingly call "love the feeling," from loving relationships.19 It seems perfectly coherent to think that someone could love another from a distance, or merely in absence of a romantic relationship. One of the cold hard facts of life is that much love goes unrequited. Given the mere possibility of unrequited love, we can be certain that the romantic love 15 It might also be that the car lover sees the car as an extension of himself; If so, we have a simple case of self-love by proxy. I doubt that we can say the same of love of countries and sports teams. Newton-Smith (1989, p.210) argues that love is essentially reciprocal. If this is right, then one cannot love a sports team. But it seems one can. So love must not be essentially reciprocal. 16 Sumner (1996, ch.7) provides an excellent discussion of this issue. 17 Hurka (1993, p.17) thinks we should be careful to distinguish between perfectionist value and welfare. Following Aristotle, much of the environmental ethics literature runs the two concepts together to great peril. Sumner (1996, pp.212-217) provides a clear corrective to this mistake. 18 Wolf (2010b, pp.14 and 17) agrees. Newton-Smith (1989, p.204) puts care at the top of the concepts analytically presupposed by the use of "love." 19 Nozick (1991) argues that we should principally be concerned with the relationship.

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Evaluating Attitudes

that a lover feels for his beloved is different from any romantic relationship that might exists between the two. This is clear. However, the difference between the attitude and the relationship is more difficult to see when it comes to friendship. In English we lack a specific word for the attitude that one has toward friends. We talk of eros and romantic love, but not friendros and friendly love. All we have is a word denoting the relationship, "friendship." I suspect that this is likely because the feelings involved in friendships are more subdued than they are in eros.20 Regardless, on further reflection it is clear that the love one feels for a friend is also distinct from the relationship, distinct from the friendship.21 One can continue to care for a friend after having moved far away. Although you cannot have a genuine friendship without the attitude, the attitude can persist after the relationship is over. It can even persist after the friend dies. Hence, the attitude and the relationship (the friendship) are not the same. To put things together: When I ask "Is better to love better things?" I want to know if it is better to love (to have an attitude that essentially involves a concern for the beloved for her own sake directed at) better people. The revised version of the opening question is still ambiguous. By asking "Is it better to love better people?" we might simply be looking for ways in which it is better to love some people rather than others. Clearly it is better for me to love those who make me happy. That's not at all controversial. Hence, I don't think that's all someone might be after when they ask such a question. Instead, they likely want to know if there are reasons in favor of loving someone or another. This concern is captured by a slightly revised version of the question, "What reasons are there to love better people?"

4 Evaluating Attitudes Frankfurt and Wolf are interested in the normative evaluation of the attitude of caring, for which they often interchange "love." In the philosophical literature on attitudes, the justification of belief has received far more attention than that of care, love, or the emotions. I will pursue the issue from the perspective of the philosophy of emotion, while 20

Montaigne's (1991) love for his dead fried La Boétie may be a counterexample. But I'm not so sure. The conspicuous absence of any discussion of (adult) homosexuality suggest that this is a sublimated, or simply disguised, expression of homosexual romantic love. 21 Jollimore (2000, p.73) concurs. 9

Evaluating Attitudes

paying attention to the problem of luck that has occupied epistemologist for the past fifty years. One of the most prominent concerns of philosophers of emotion is the issue of whether standard emotions admit of rational justification. This issue is often said to concern the rationality of the emotions.22 But what people mean by "the rationality of emotion" varies radically. Just as Frankfurt and Wolf operate with different evaluative notions, philosophers of emotion often talk past one another. In the literature on the emotions, there is a wide variety of different standards for evaluating the rationality of emotions. We can discern at least five: (1) reasonableness, (2) aptness, (3) proportionality, (4) selfinterest, and (5) intelligibility.23 To expand a bit: (1) We might wonder if an emotion is reasonable given the evidence. Alternatively, (2) we might wonder if it fits the situation, if the emotion is apt. For standard emotions, this would require showing that their evaluations are correct. Or (3) we might wonder whether the intensity of an emotion is proportional to its object.24 Or (4) we might ask if the emotion was in one's long-term best interest. Or (5) we might try to understand why someone would react that way. If so, if we can understand why they reacted as they did, the emotion is intelligible. All of these standards are interesting, and we could certainly add to the list. But for now I want to focus on just one of the above, that of aptness — whether the emotion is appropriate to the features of its object. This standard is most important in the literature on love. The question of whether we can justify love is primarily a question about the appropriateness of the attitude to its object, the beloved. When we ask whether love can be justified, we want to know if there are normative reasons that could make the love of some objects appropriate and others inappropriate. As I will make clear in the next section, justifying love 22

I do not think that love is an emotion, but I will put this aside for now. See Smuts (manuscript-c) for a defense of the claim that love is not an emotion. 23 Jones (2004, pp.333-336) provides a helpful summary of the various ways in which we might evaluate emotional rationality. She includes evaluative correctness, excludes intelligibility, and calls self-interest strategic wisdom. 24 It is not clear that one can evaluate aptness while ignoring proportionality. But it is terribly hard to give a plausible account of what would make an emotional response proportional that does not make recourse to self-interest and intelligibility. Hence, the concerns are not easily isolated. 10

Evaluating Attitudes

will require showing that the attitude is responsive to these kinds of reasons.

Motivating Reasons, Normative Reasons, and Luck To understand the nature of justification it is important to make a distinction between motivating and normative reasons. Motivating reasons are best thought of as a species of explanatory reasons.25 In terms of actions, motivating reasons explain why we act. A motivating reason is the efficacious motive of an action. As the familiar courtroom drama makes clear, one is much more likely to secure a guilty verdict if there is a clear motive for the crime. When we try to account for a killer's motive, we are trying to describe his motivating reasons. We are trying to explain, not justify the crime. But sometimes, one's motivating reasons can also be justifying reasons. For instance, if someone cracks a rapist's dome with a Brooklyn Crusher in order to stop a violent rape, the victim's suffering most plausibly justifies the intervention. The motivating and justifying reasons are the same, or at least close enough. When it comes to actions, normative reasons are those that count in favor of a course of action. Stopping undeserved suffering is a good reason to act. But it is important to note that the mere presence of normative reasons does not always justify an action. This is because we are sometimes unaware of the normative reasons we might have to act. A fanatical Islamic terrorist with a pressure cooker bomb might be standing in front of us at a crowded event. If so, we surely have good reason to smash him in the back of the head with a brick before he can trigger an explosion. But if we do not know that the person in front of us is a terrorist, this reason is not available to us. If, ignorant of the fact, we nevertheless decide to crack his skull for wearing an ugly shirt, the unavailable normative reason could not justify our action. It is certainly not O.K. to smack someone for wearing an ugly shirt. This reveals something important about normative reasons: in order to justify an action, the normative reasons must feature prominently in the set of motivating reasons for the action.26 If the person we smacked for wearing an ugly shirt turned out to be a terrorist, this would be a happy accident. But the unknown fact that he was a terrorist would not justify laying him out for his lack of good fashion sense. Happy accidents do not amount to 25

Crisp (2006, ch.2) defends a fairly standard taxonomy. Acting wrongly in ignorance of reasons to do otherwise is slightly more complicated to account for. 26

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Evaluating Attitudes

justifications.27 There is no reason to think that the situation is any different when it comes to justifying attitudes and other non-actions. Although there are not (straightforward) motivating reasons for attitudes, there are explanatory reasons. They give us the etiology of the attitude. In order for an attitude to be justified in the sense at issue here, the etiology must prominently include the justifying reasons. If there were normative reasons for having an attitude, but the reasons did not feature in the explanation of the attitude, the presence of the normative reasons would be a mere happy accident. To put it another way, an attitude is a mere happy accident in relation to some normative reason unless the attitude is a response to that normative reason. A justification for an attitude must show that the attitude is a response to normative reasons, not merely that some such reasons exist.28

Justifying Love There are two competing schools of thought on the issue of whether love can be justified: the no-reasons view and the reasons view. The noreasons view is just as it sounds. It holds that love cannot be justified, or to put it somewhat ambiguously, there are no justifying reasons for love. A no-reasons view holds one of two claims: (1) there are no normative reasons for love, or (2) the attitude is not responsive to whatever putative normative reasons there might be. In contrast, the reasons view holds that love can be justified. As we saw in the last section, this will require showing both that there are normative reasons for love and that the attitude is responsive to these reasons at the appropriate stage in its life 27

Williams (1981) seems to think that what I'm calling happy accidents can provide a kind of backward justification. If so, he is deeply wrong. 28 I have never seen this theory of justification defended. But it seems right. Goldie (2004, pp.98-99) briefly defends a related view about justifying emotions. He argues that an emotional reaction is justified if it was formed in reaction to reasons that also justify attributing the emotion-proper property to the target. The emotion-proper property (a.k.a., the "formal object) of fear is dangerousness. If I fear a snarling dog because it looks mad and has big teeth, then I my fear is a response to the properties that make the dog dangerous. Deonna and Teroni (2012, pp.96-97) defend a similar view. Their view is couched in the language of supervenience. For an emotion to be justified, it must be a response to the subvening properties of a supervening evaluative property that features in the correctness conditions for the emotion. They (2012, pp.113-115) do not think that love and other sentiments can be justified in this way. 12

Evaluating Attitudes

cycle. This is no place to defend the no-reasons view, but I will sketch some support. The no-reasons view is supported by three types of considerations: (1) love's apparent lack of reasons responsiveness, (2) the failure of the opposition to provide a plausible alternative, and (3) the lack of any clear account of how love could be justified in principle. (1) Our literary tradition from Sappho to Shakespeare provides support for the claim that love is not an objective assessment of the beloved. To take an extreme and somewhat offensive example, Lucretius sees love as a delusion: The black girl is brown sugar. A slob that doesn't bathe or clean / Is a Natural Beauty; Athena if her eyes are greyish-green. / A stringy beenpole's a gazelle. A midget is a sprite, / Cute as a button. She's a knockout if she's a giant's height. / The speech-impaired has a charming lithp; if she can't talk at all / She's shy. The sharp-tongued shrew is spunky, a little fireball. / If she's too skin-and-bones to live, she's a slip of a girl, if she / Is sickly, she's just delicate, though half dead from TB. / Obese, with massive breasts? — a goddess of fertility! / Snub-nosed is pert, fat lips are pouts begging to be kissed — / And other delusions of this kind are too numerous to list.29

We need not think that love essentially involves error. Lucretius goes much too far. Nevertheless, love does not seem to follow from any objective appraisal. Love rides over and above any assessment of the beloved. We can work at trying to love someone, but it seems to just happen or not. No matter how good we think that someone is, we may or may not love them. Love, at least to some degree, just does seem to be a matter of chemistry. And chemistry of this kind is not reasons responsive. (2) The no-reasons view also gains support from the failure of the competition. Any attempt to appeal to the properties of the beloved runs into the problem of trading up: If what justified your starting to love X were X's good features, then if Y has a greater degree of the same features, it seems that you should trade up. How could your continuing to love X be justified in the face of Y? But this is absurd. The objects of our love are not fungible. No, they are irreplaceable individuals.30 Alternative approaches appeal to the value of the relationship rather 29

Lucretius (2007, p.142; bk.IV, ln.1160-1170). Grau (2006, 2010, and forthcoming) offers the best account of irreplaceability in the literature. 30

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Evaluating Attitudes

than the properties of the beloved. But relationship accounts do not fare much better. They also imply that one should trade up, not when the beloved is better, but when there is the promise of an even better relationship. These are but the opening moves in the debate. It is out of scope to pursue the issue further. For our purposes, the third source of support is most important. (3) Although I appeal to models of attitude evaluation found in the literature on the emotions, there is excellent reason to think that love is not an emotion.31 According to a widely accepted theory of the emotions, the cognitive theory, emotions are object-directed attitudes that essentially involve evaluations.32 On this view, emotions are not mere feelings or physiological reactions. Instead, emotions require an evaluation of a situation, whether the evaluation be a judgment or a way of seeing, a construal.33 The object-directed character of standard 31

I give one reason here, but there are two others: (1) love is not episodic as are all standard emotions, and (2) emotions depend on our concerns or cares. If we call love an emotion, we lose the explanatory power of this priority. It becomes hard to make sense of the interconnectedness of our emotional lives. As many have noted, emotions seem to require that one care about that which was or stands to be affected by the object. For instance: Taylor (1975, pp. 400-401) notes the connection, as do Stocker (1996, p. 175), Green (1997, pp.214 and 221-222), and Rawls (1971, p.487). Solomon (1980, p.276) argues that emotions are personal and involved evaluations. Taylor (1985, pp. 59-62) argues that emotions reveal what we value, what matters to us. They are import-ascriptions. Roberts (1988, pp. 1888-189) claims that emotions are grounded in concerns. Shoemaker (2003, pp.91-93) argues that emotions are conceptually connected to cares. Helm (2009a, pp. 5-6) notes that emotions have a focus, a locus of concern. And Nussbaum (2003) argues that emotions are evaluations of personal importance. Strangely, in his comprehensive and influential taxonomy of the objects of emotions, De Sousa (1999, ch.5) leaves out the object of our concern. He uses "focus" differently, to refer to the focus of attention: the snarling dog's menacing teeth. 32 Prinz (2004) and Robinson (2005) provide important, recent criticisms of the theory. Deigh (1994) argues that the cognitive theory implausibly implies that animals and babies do not have emotions. Rowlands (2012, pp.40-70) provides an effective reply to Deigh. Deonna and Teroni (2012) reject the judgment theory, though they defend something that looks much like a cognitive theory. 33 Solomon (1980) defends the unpopular view that emotions just are evaluations, or what he later (p.276) calls personal evaluations. Roberts (1988) argues that the evaluation involved in emotions should not be thought of as a judgment, but as a construal, a way of seeing. 14

Evaluating Attitudes

emotions is apparent in that it always makes sense to say of someone "[pick your emotion] that." I fear that a Rhode Island driver will crash into me when I'm out for run. I hope that I will make it home safely. I'm angry that yet another driver ran a stop sign as I was running through the intersection. . . . Defenders of the cognitive theory typically distinguish between emotions and mere moods, such as being grumpy or being cheerful, or simply being in a good mood.34 Moods do not take objects, at least not specific objects.35 One is not grumpy that such and such. No, one is just grumpy. One might be grumpy because of a hangover. But one is not grumpy at the hangover. Nor is one grumpy that one is hung over. Although, someone might be ashamed that he was once again unable to resist the siren call of bourbon, this is not the object of his grumpiness. At most, it is the mere cause. Shame is an emotion; grumpiness is a mere mood. If the cognitive theory is right, then love is not an emotion. Unlike standard emotions there is no clear evaluation involved that helps individuate love from other species of affect. According to the cognitive theory, standard emotions not only essentially involve evaluations, the evaluations are the principal means by which we distinguish emotions from one another. Consider fear and anger, joy and pride, envy and jealousy, and shame and embarrassment: each pair feels similar. There is hardly any telling them apart merely from the way they feel. But the kind of evaluations they involve differ. For an emotion to be that of anger, one must judge that someone has wronged you or yours. In contrast, for an emotion to be that of fear, one must judge that something one cares about is in danger. The problem for those who claim that love is an emotion is that there is no plausible evaluation that is necessary for love.36 The only viable 34

Some terms, such as happy, seem to cover both emotions and moods. One might be happy that something is the case. And one might just be happy. The term is multiply ambiguous. Sumner (1996, pp.143-7) distinguishes between four senses of "happy." Feldman (2010) attempts to defend a core sense. 35 Perhaps moods take everything as their objects. This would account for how they color the way we see the world. But taking everything as the object of an attitude is akin to taking nothing. 36 This leads Shaffer (1983, p.170) to claim that love is an "anomalous emotion." Green (1997, p.214) thinks that this obscures the problem. He simply denies that love is an emotion. Hamlyn (1989) argues that this feature of love shows that the cognitive theory is wrong. He assumes that the claim 15

Prudential, Epistemic, and Meaningful Reasons

candidate seems to be that the object is loveable. But this is hopeless. It is circular and entirely uninformative. Just what is it to judge an object to be loveable? The moral of the story: Since there is no clear candidate evaluation that is necessary for love, it is unclear how love could be assessed for evaluative correctness. What evaluation should be checked, exactly? In the next section, I'll show how the disinterested nature of love makes this problem more pronounced. It has important implications for the kinds of reasons that Frankfurt and Wolf appeal to.

5 Prudential, Epistemic, and Meaningful Reasons So far we have said a bit about the nature of love and the nature of justification. Without assuming the no-reasons view, I will show that the kinds of considerations that Frankfurt and Wolf appeal to are not the kinds of reasons that could ever justify love. Accordingly, there is no problem for the no-reasons view here. Consider Frankfurt's preferred consideration, that of welfare (a.k.a., well-being or prudential value): A theory of welfare tells us what is ultimately good or bad for a person, what is in her self-interest. Welfare is what we seek to promote when we do something for another's sake. It's what we often sacrifice when we act altruistically. What improves my well-being is precisely what is good for me. It is clear that Frankfurt thinks that caring (or loving) is good for us. It is good for us to love. Why he thinks this is less clear. As far as I can tell, he thinks that loving makes our lives fulfilling. It does this by helping to prevent apathetic suffering and boredom. This is likely right. It probably is indeed good for us to love. And it is probably prudentially better to love what is better at making us happy. But these kinds of considerations are incapble of justifying any given instance of love. In fact, they appear to be entirely the wrong kind of reasons that one can offer in favor of loving a particular individual. At best, these kinds of considerations can justify loving in general. Let me explain. As noted earlier, we are looking for reasons in support of particular instances of love: "What normative reasons might there be to love X?" that love is an emotion is more secure than the cognitive theory. It's not clear why. In support of his worry, it pays to note that there are a variety of nonstandard kinds of affect that are hard to classify, such as boredom and curiosity. Are these emotions? If so, the cognitive theory is likely in trouble. 16

Prudential, Epistemic, and Meaningful Reasons

We are not looking for a general justification of loving. In the closely related literature on whether partiality (to family, friends, race, ethnicity, or nation) is ever permissible, many are content with a general defense of simply being partial. If we were not partial to our friends and family, our lives would suffer. The goods of close personal relationships would be lost. Hence, it seems partiality is in general justified.37 Here we need not worry whether this style of argument succeeds. I merely note it to show that it simply does not address the issue at hand. We do not want to know whether it is good to love; we want to know if we can justify our love of specific individuals. It is crucial to see that the putative prudential value of loving (in general) cannot provide a justification for loving some specific person. The suggestion that my love for X is justified because it is good for me to love X, or because it is better for me to love X than Y, fails. It fails because love requires non-self-interested concern. And one cannot, on pain of incoherence, love another non-self-interestedly because doing so benefits oneself.38 One cannot care for another for her sake for one's own sake. Remember, for a reason to justify an attitude, the attitude must be responsive to the reason. If the reason is self-interest, the attitude cannot be responsive to this reason and be non-self-interested.39 Hence, selfinterest cannot justify any particular occurrence of love.40 At best it can justify loving in general, being open to love, or what we might call the

37

This wheel has been invented a few times: Cottingham (1983, 1986, and 1996) defends this line of argument. Without mentioning Cottingham, the same style of argument is repeated in Wolf (1992), who defends the controversial claim that partiality sometimes trumps morality. And without mentioning Wolf's paper, Cocking and Kennett (2000) reach roughly the same conclusion. 38 The same holds for indirect forms of benefit, say, through the value of a relationship. 39 Oldenquist (1982, p.176) runs structurally similar argument against the self-interest defense of loyalty. He argues that since we can sacrifice in the name of loyalty, loyalties are not self-interested. The problem I present is more difficult to solve. 40 It is not clear how we should account for self-love. It is unclear that one can selflessly love one's self. We must either deny that we can love ourselves, or deny that love must be selfless. Perhaps when we say that a selfish person loves only himself, this is to say that he does not love. Alternatively, perhaps it is better to say that love requires concern for the beloved for her own sake. This would avoid the paradox of self-love. One can coherently care about one's self for one's own sake. But that's all. 17

What's Wrong With Loving Hitler

institution of loving.41 Frankfurt recognizes that there is a "certain inconsistency" here. He says: The apparent conflict between selflessness and self-interest disappears once it is understood that what serves the self-interest of the lover is, precisely, his selflessness. The benefit of loving accrues to him only if he is genuinely selfless.42

But this doesn't solve the problem. It won't just disappear in a puff of smoke after a bit of hand waving. The fact that the benefit can accrue only if the lover is selfless shows that the reasons of self-interest cannot justify love. One can't be responsive to reasons of self-interest and be selfless. In fact, Frankfurt has give us a perfect statement of a happy accident. Although it is not inconsistent to think that I could benefit from selflessness, it is incoherent to think that self-interest could justify my selflessness. The same considerations hold for reasons of truthfulness and the reasons of meaningfulness. One cannot love another for her own sake for the sake of truth or for the sake of making one's life more meaningful. That's incoherent. A defender of the no-reasons view could grant that it is prudentially, truthfully, and meaningfully better to love better people and still hold, without any kind of tension, that love cannot be rationally justified.

6 What's Wrong With Loving Hitler Although reasons of prudence, truthfulness, and meaning cannot justify love, there still seems to be something to the claim that it is better to love better people. It seems that some people are indeed more loveable than others, and that some people are just not worthy of love. This seems to be a simple matter of evaluative correctness. Wolf develops her view with an array of examples that concern objects and activities: types of music, watermelon seed spitting, rubberband collection, and the like. A similar set of examples is featured in her

41

Burch (1989, pp.248-251) defends a more radical claim, though his position is somewhat unclear. He appears to think it incoherent to say that x loves y for some motive or another. 42 Frankfurt (1999c, p.174). 18

What's Wrong With Loving Hitler

work on the meaning of life.43 Again, it is plausible to say that one is justified in preferring rock music to classical music by appeal to affinity and instrumental value, regardless of any possible differences in the worth of the two types of music. But the theory sits more uncomfortably when it comes to people, as the example of a mother's unequal love shows. Perhaps this is a mere quirk of parental love. Maybe we have a deep commitment to a view of unconditional parental love. Perhaps we think of it as a form of agape, the bestowal of love regardless of the worth of the object. Perhaps. But the situation seems different when it comes to romantic love.44 It seems that some people are indeed more loveable than others and it would be better to love them. How should we make sense of this? If love essentially involves an evaluation, we could easily make sense of this. But there is no good candidate. As noted earlier, the only plausible candidate is that the object is loveable. This is not sufficient, since we might think that people are loveable, but not love them. But it might be necessary. If we had a better handle on what makes someone objectively loveable, then we could evaluate love in terms of evaluative correctness. It would be inappropriate to love those who are not loveable. The problem, once again, is that there is no content to the notion of what it is to be loveable. At best, it is subjectively determined. Someone is loveable if someone can love you. But that kind of subjectivity makes it impossible to assess love. All love would be appropriate. Put aside the nature of being loveable. Perhaps it would be better to talk in terms of an overall assessment of the person. For love to appropriate, the beloved should be overall a good person. This is a bit more promising, but it is still hopeless. For starters, what kind of good do we have in mind? Will just any do? Aesthetic? Is it appropriate to love a beautiful person who is not so virtuous? Or does moral worth trump all? That's hard to believe. Apart from these questions, the central problem with any attempt to evaluate love according to some kind synoptic evaluation of the beloved is that love isn't an evaluation. Love rides over and above any such evaluation. We can be criticized for falsely evaluating people, but love is not an evaluation. Nevertheless, the relationship between love and 43

Wolf (2002 and 2010a). In a forthcoming article on Philadelphia Story (Cukor, 1940) Wolf turns to an example involving romantic love. But she does not directly address the issue. 44

19

What's Wrong With Loving Hitler

evaluation is important. Consider someone who falls in love with Hitler, who somehow faked his death and managed to flee to South America: 45 Argentina, 1950: Selena met a strange looking man with a German accent at the market. She finds him oddly attractive. As they get to know each other, she develops a nagging suspicion that he is Adolph Hitler. After a few weeks, he confesses to having faked suicide and fled to South America when the Nazi cause looked hopeless. Selena decides not to turn him, as she thinks that she is falling in love.

Considering this case, it seems that love is indeed sometimes prohibited. It certainly seems inappropriate to fall in love with Hitler. And if it is inappropriate, there must be normative reasons against loving. This is certainly a worrisome problem for the no-reasons view. But the view is not without a plausible reply. An analogy to humor might help. The French vitalist Henri Bergson noted that humorous amusement requires a "momentary anesthesia of the heart."46 It is hard to be amused if one feels sorry for the butt of a joke. Something similar might be said for love. It is hard to love someone you find hideously repulsive. Hitler is hideously repulsive, not just because of the stupid mustache, but because of what he did. He's a moral monster. How could someone possibly love such a man? How could one spend enough time with this freak for that to happen? In these observations, the no-reasons view finds a reply: It is not that love of Hitler is inappropriate, but that not finding him repulsive shows a monstrous indifference to horrific evil.47 At worse love can be indirectly, counter-factually inappropriate. If Selena had shown proper repulsion to Hitler's crimes, she would have likely found it psychologically impossible to fall in love with Hitler. This does not show that Hitler is objective unloveable. No, it shows that the typical psychological affect of moral repulsion is the blocking of love. The question this leaves us is whether it should block love. What would we say of someone who was repulsed but still loved Hitler? if it is incoherent to be both repulsed and in love, then we can say 45

Jeske (1997, p.62) defends a no-reasons, or "brute account" friendship. She (p.69) considers whether one should befriend Hitler. Milligan (2011. pp.5 and 72) also discusses the love of Hitler. 46 Bergson (1956, p.64). 47 Smuts (2007, 2009, and forthcoming) develops an analogous line of argument concerning morality and amusement. 20

Conclusion

that love is indirectly inappropriate. The person should have been repulsed. Repulsion blocks love. Hence, they shouldn't love Hitler. At least they shouldn't have fallen in love with Hitler. But I don't see any reason to think that this combination of attitudes in incoherent. Unusual, yes. Incoherent, why? And if it is coherent to both love someone and be repulsed by their character or actions, then there is not much to say of someone who loves Hitler other than that she is very abnormal.

7 Conclusion As I noted in the introduction, I have not provided a completely satisfactory answer to the question, "Is it better to love better things?" The question is just too ambiguous and too difficult to tackle in a single essay. Even the more specific question, is it better to love better people is hard to pin down. But I have provided some answers. I argue that love essentially involves caring for the beloved for her own sake. This is clearly not a sufficient description of love. Most plausibly, typical forms of love also involve desires to associate with the beloved and for the desire to be reciprocated.48 Most likely, such desires admit of rational assessment. If desires are the kind of things that can be justified, it seems that reasons of self-interest, for instance, could justify a desire to associate with the beloved. But I don't think that these desires capture what is at the heart of love. At heart is selfless concern. Hence, I focus on this aspect of love. And this aspect is different from both the desire to associate with the beloved and the desire for reciprocation. It's different in that it cannot be justified by appeals to values such as self-interest, truthfulness, or meaning. One cannot care for the beloved for her own sake for the sake of these values. That's incoherent. Nevertheless, it does seem better, in terms of appropriateness (or fittingness or aptness), to love better people. Although love is not an assessment, it is typically blocked by certain kinds of assessments of the beloved. When we don't understand how a friend can love a boring, immoral, ugly, loser, we are puzzled at how he failed to come to the proper negative evaluation of his beloved, or at how the negative 48

Thomas (1991), Green (1997, p.216), and Taylor (1976) all emphasize these aspects of romantic love. 21

Conclusion

evaluation didn't block love. We expect this to happen, though, sadly, we know it often fails. I considered an especially clear case, Selena's love of Hitler. Here we want to say that she should not love Hitler — not because he doesn't deserve to benefit from her concern, but because she should have been repulsed. Hitler is hideously evil. If someone falls for Hitler despite the fact that he is hideously evil, they are likely indifferent to his crimes. That's not acceptable. In so far as moral disgust blocks love, love of Hitler is indirectly inappropriate. But, as far as I can tell, there is no reason to think that disgust ought to block love. It just tends to do so. I think that's about all we can say. And it seems like enough to capture our most important intuitions.49

49

I thank Arina Pismenny for helpful feedback on an earlier version of this paper. 22

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