## 1. Preliminary Distinctions



In ordinary conversations, we often say things like the following:


1. I love chocolate (or skiing).
2. I love doing philosophy (or being a father).
3. I love my dog (or cat).
4. I love my wife (or mother or child or friend).



However, what is meant by 'love' differs from case to
case. (1) may be understood as meaning merely that I like this thing
or activity very much. In (2) the implication is typically that I find
engaging in a certain activity or being a certain kind of person to be
a part of my identity and so what makes my life worth living; I might
just as well say that I *value* these. By contrast, (3) and (4)
seem to indicate a mode of concern that cannot be neatly assimilated
to anything else. Thus, we might understand the sort of love at issue
in (4) to be, roughly, a matter of caring about another person as the
person she is, for her own sake. (Accordingly, (3) may be understood
as a kind of deficient mode of the sort of love we typically reserve
for persons.) Philosophical accounts of love have focused primarily on
the sort of *personal* love at issue in (4); such personal love
will be the focus here (though see Frankfurt (1999) and Jaworska &
Wonderly (2017) for attempts to provide a more general account that
applies to non-persons as well).



Even within personal love, philosophers from the ancient Greeks on
have traditionally distinguished three notions that can properly be
called "love": *eros*, *agape*, and
*philia*. It will be useful to distinguish these three and say
something about how contemporary discussions typically blur these
distinctions (sometimes intentionally so) or use them for other
purposes.



'*Eros*' originally meant love in the sense of a
kind of passionate desire for an object, typically sexual passion
(Liddell et al., 1940). Nygren (1953a,b) describes *eros* as
the "'love of desire,' or acquisitive love"
and therefore as egocentric (1953b, p. 89). Soble (1989b, 1990)
similarly describes *eros* as "selfish" and as a
response to the merits of the beloved--especially the
beloved's goodness or beauty. What is evident in Soble's
description of *eros* is a shift away from the sexual: to love
something in the "erosic" sense (to use the term Soble
coins) is to love it in a way that, by being responsive to its merits,
is dependent on reasons. Such an understanding of *eros* is
encouraged by Plato's discussion in the *Symposium*, in
which Socrates understands sexual desire to be a deficient response to
physical beauty in particular, a response which ought to be developed
into a response to the beauty of a person's soul and,
ultimately, into a response to the form, Beauty.



Soble's intent in understanding *eros* to be a
reason-dependent sort of love is to articulate a sharp contrast with
*agape*, a sort of love that does not respond to the value of
its object. '*Agape*' has come, primarily through
the Christian tradition, to mean the sort of love God has for us
persons, as well as our love for God and, by extension, of our love
for each other--a kind of brotherly love. In the paradigm case of
God's love for us, *agape* is "spontaneous and
unmotivated," revealing not that we merit that love but that
God's nature is love (Nygren 1953b, p. 85). Rather than
responding to antecedent value in its object, *agape* instead
is supposed to *create* value in its object and therefore to
initiate our fellowship with God (pp. 87-88). Consequently,
Badhwar (2003, p. 58) characterizes *agape* as
"independent of the loved individual's fundamental
characteristics as the particular person she is"; and Soble
(1990, p. 5) infers that *agape*, in contrast to *eros*,
is therefore not reason dependent but is rationally
"incomprehensible," admitting at best of causal or
historical
 explanations.[1]



Finally, '*philia*' originally meant a kind of
affectionate regard or friendly feeling towards not just one's
friends but also possibly towards family members, business partners,
and one's country at large (Liddell et al., 1940; Cooper, 1977).
Like *eros*, *philia* is generally (but not universally)
understood to be responsive to (good) qualities in one's
beloved. This similarity between *eros* and *philia* has
led Thomas (1987) to wonder whether the only difference between
romantic love and friendship is the sexual involvement of the
former--and whether that is adequate to account for the real
differences we experience. The distinction between *eros* and
*philia* becomes harder to draw with Soble's attempt to
diminish the importance of the sexual in *eros* (1990).



Maintaining the distinctions among *eros*, *agape*, and
*philia* becomes even more difficult when faced with
contemporary theories of love (including romantic love) and
friendship. For, as discussed below, some theories of romantic love
understand it along the lines of the *agape* tradition as
creating value in the beloved (cf.
 Section 4.2),
 and other accounts of romantic love treat sexual activity as merely
the expression of what otherwise looks very much like friendship.



Given the focus here on *personal* love, Christian conceptions
of God's love for persons (and *vice versa*) will be
omitted, and the distinction between *eros* and *philia*
will be blurred--as it typically is in contemporary accounts.
Instead, the focus here will be on these contemporary understandings
of love, including romantic love, understood as an *attitude*
we take towards other
 persons.[2]



In providing an account of love, philosophical analyses must be
careful to distinguish love from other positive attitudes we take
towards persons, such as liking. Intuitively, love differs from such
attitudes as liking in terms of its "depth," and the
problem is to elucidate the kind of "depth" we intuitively
find love to have. Some analyses do this in part by providing thin
conceptions of what liking amounts to. Thus, Singer (1991) and Brown
(1987) understand liking to be a matter of desiring, an attitude that
at best involves its object having only instrumental (and not
intrinsic) value. Yet this seems inadequate: surely there are
attitudes towards persons intermediate between having a desire with a
person as its object and loving the person. I can care about a person
for her own sake and not merely instrumentally, and yet such caring
does not on its own amount to (non-deficiently) loving her, for it
seems I can care about my dog in exactly the same way, a kind of
caring which is insufficiently *personal* for love.



It is more common to distinguish loving from liking via the intuition
that the "depth" of love is to be explained in terms of a
notion of identification: to love someone is somehow to
*identify* yourself with him, whereas no such notion of
identification is involved in liking. As Nussbaum puts it, "The
choice between one potential love and another can feel, and be, like a
choice of a way of life, a decision to dedicate oneself to these
values rather than these" (1990, p. 328); liking clearly does
not have this sort of "depth" (see also Helm 2010; Bagley
2015). Whether love involves some kind of identification, and if so
exactly how to understand such identification, is a central bone of
contention among the various analyses of love. In particular, Whiting
(2013) argues that the appeal to a notion of identification distorts
our understanding of the sort of motivation love can provide, for
taken literally it implies that love motivates through
*self*-interest rather than through the
*beloved's* interests. Thus, Whiting argues, central to
love is the possibility that love takes the lover "outside
herself", potentially forgetting herself in being moved directly
by the interests of the beloved. (Of course, we need not take the
notion of identification literally in this way: in identifying with
one's beloved, one might have a concern for one's beloved
that is *analogous* to one's concern for oneself; see
Helm 2010.)



Another common way to distinguish love from other personal attitudes
is in terms of a distinctive kind of evaluation, which itself can
account for love's "depth." Again, whether love
essentially involves a distinctive kind of evaluation, and if so how
to make sense of that evaluation, is hotly disputed. Closely related
to questions of evaluation are questions of justification: can we
justify loving or continuing to love a particular person, and if so,
how? For those who think the justification of love is possible, it is
common to understand such justification in terms of evaluation, and
the answers here affect various accounts' attempts to make sense
of the kind of constancy or commitment love seems to involve, as well
as the sense in which love is directed at particular individuals.



In what follows, theories of love are tentatively and hesitantly
classified into four types: love as union, love as robust concern,
love as valuing, and love as an emotion. It should be clear, however,
that particular theories classified under one type sometimes also
include, without contradiction, ideas central to other types. The
types identified here overlap to some extent, and in some cases
classifying particular theories may involve excessive pigeonholing.
(Such cases are noted below.) Part of the classificatory problem is
that many accounts of love are quasi-reductionistic, understanding
love in terms of notions like affection, evaluation, attachment, etc.,
which themselves never get analyzed. Even when these accounts eschew
explicitly reductionistic language, very often little attempt is made
to show how one such "aspect" of love is conceptually
connected to others. As a result, there is no clear and obvious way to
classify particular theories, let alone identify what the relevant
classes should be.


## 2. Love as Union



The
 union view claims that love consists in the formation of (or the
desire to form) some significant kind of union, a "we." A
central task for union theorists, therefore, is to spell out just what
such a "we" comes to--whether it is literally a new
entity in the world somehow composed of the lover and the beloved, or
whether it is merely metaphorical. Variants of this view perhaps go
back to Aristotle (cf. Sherman 1993) and can also be found in
Montaigne ([E]) and Hegel (1997); contemporary proponents include
Solomon (1981, 1988), Scruton (1986), Nozick (1989), Fisher (1990),
and Delaney (1996).



Scruton, writing in particular about romantic love, claims that love
exists "just so soon as reciprocity becomes community: that is,
just so soon as all distinction between my interests and your
interests is overcome" (1986, p. 230). The idea is that the
union is a union of concern, so that when I act out of that concern it
is not for my sake alone or for your sake alone but for *our*
sake. Fisher (1990) holds a similar, but somewhat more moderate view,
claiming that love is a *partial* fusion of the lovers'
cares, concerns, emotional responses, and actions. What is striking
about both Scruton and Fisher is the claim that love requires the
*actual* union of the lovers' concerns, for it thus
becomes clear that they conceive of love not so much as an attitude we
take towards another but as a relationship: the distinction between
your interests and mine genuinely disappears only when we together
come to have shared cares, concerns, etc., and my merely having a
certain attitude towards you is not enough for love. This provides
content to the notion of a "we" as the (metaphorical?)
subject of these shared cares and concerns, and as that for whose sake
we act.



Solomon (1988) offers a union view as well, though one that tries
"to make new sense out of 'love' through a literal
rather than metaphoric sense of the 'fusion' of two
souls" (p. 24, cf. Solomon 1981; however, it is unclear exactly
what he means by a "soul" here and so how love can be a
"literal" fusion of two souls). What Solomon has in mind
is the way in which, through love, the lovers redefine their
identities as persons in terms of the relationship: "Love is the
concentration and the intensive focus of mutual definition on a single
individual, subjecting virtually every personal aspect of one's
self to this process" (1988, p. 197). The result is that lovers
come to share the interests, roles, virtues, and so on that constitute
what formerly was two individual identities but now has become a
shared identity, and they do so in part by each allowing the other to
play an important role in defining his own identity.



Nozick (1989) offers a union view that differs from those of Scruton,
Fisher, and Solomon in that Nozick thinks that what is necessary for
love is merely the *desire* to form a "we,"
together with the desire that your beloved reciprocates. Nonetheless,
he claims that this "we" is "a new entity in the
world...created by a new web of relationships between [the
lovers] which makes them no longer separate" (p. 70). In
spelling out this web of relationships, Nozick appeals to the lovers
"pooling" not only their well-beings, in the sense that
the well-being of each is tied up with that of the other, but also
their autonomy, in that "each transfers some previous rights to
make certain decisions unilaterally into a joint pool" (p. 71).
In addition, Nozick claims, the lovers each acquire a new identity as
a part of the "we," a new identity constituted by their
(a) wanting to be perceived publicly as a couple, (b) their attending
to their pooled well-being, and (c) their accepting a "certain
kind of division of labor" (p. 72):



> 
> A person in a *we* might find himself coming across something
> interesting to read yet leaving it for the other person, not because
> he himself would not be interested in it but because the other would
> be more interested, and one of them reading it is sufficient for it to
> be registered by the wider identity now shared, the
>  *we*.[3]
> 



Opponents of the union view have seized on claims like this as
excessive: union theorists, they claim, take too literally the
ontological commitments of this notion of a "we." This
leads to two specific criticisms of the union view. The first is that
union views do away with individual autonomy. Autonomy, it seems,
involves a kind of independence on the part of the autonomous agent,
such that she is in control over not only what she does but also who
she is, as this is constituted by her interests, values, concerns,
etc. However, union views, by doing away with a clear distinction
between your interests and mine, thereby undermine this sort of
independence and so undermine the autonomy of the lovers. If autonomy
is a part of the individual's good, then, on the union view,
love is to this extent bad; so much the worse for the union view
(Singer 1994; Soble 1997). Moreover, Singer (1994) argues that a
necessary part of having your beloved be the object of your love is
respect for your beloved as the particular person she is, and this
requires respecting her autonomy.



Union theorists have responded to this objection in several ways.
Nozick (1989) seems to think of a loss of autonomy in love as a
desirable feature of the sort of union lovers can achieve. Fisher
(1990), somewhat more reluctantly, claims that the loss of autonomy in
love is an acceptable consequence of love. Yet without further
argument these claims seem like mere bullet biting. Solomon (1988, pp.
64ff) describes this "tension" between union and autonomy
as "the paradox of love." However, this a view that Soble
(1997) derides: merely to call it a paradox, as Solomon does, is not
to face up to the problem.



The second criticism involves a substantive view concerning love. Part
of what it is to love someone, these opponents say, is to have concern
for him for his sake. However, union views make such concern
unintelligible and eliminate the possibility of both selfishness and
self-sacrifice, for by doing away with the distinction between my
interests and your interests they have in effect turned your interests
into mine and *vice versa* (Soble 1997; see also Blum 1980,
1993). Some advocates of union views see this as a point in their
favor: we need to explain how it is I can have concern for people
other than myself, and the union view apparently does this by
understanding your interests to be part of my own. And Delaney,
responding to an apparent tension between our desire to be loved
unselfishly (for fear of otherwise being exploited) and our desire to
be loved for reasons (which presumably are attractive to our lover and
hence have a kind of selfish basis), says (1996, p. 346):



> 
> Given my view that the romantic ideal is primarily characterized by a
> desire to achieve a profound consolidation of needs and interests
> through the formation of a *we*, I do not think a little
> selfishness of the sort described should pose a worry to either party.
> 



The objection, however, lies precisely in this attempt to explain my
concern for my beloved egoistically. As Whiting (1991, p. 10) puts it,
such an attempt "strikes me as unnecessary and potentially
objectionable colonization": in love, I ought to be concerned
with my beloved for *her* sake, and not because I somehow get
something out of it. (This can be true whether my concern with my
beloved is merely instrumental to my good or whether it is partly
constitutive of my good.)



Although Whiting's and Soble's criticisms here succeed
against the more radical advocates of the union view, they in part
fail to acknowledge the kernel of truth to be gleaned from the idea of
union. Whiting's way of formulating the second objection in
terms of an unnecessary egoism in part points to a way out: we persons
are in part social creatures, and love is one profound mode of that
sociality. Indeed, part of the point of union accounts is to make
sense of this social dimension: to make sense of a way in which we can
sometimes identify ourselves with others not merely in becoming
interdependent with them (as Singer 1994, p. 165, suggests,
understanding 'interdependence' to be a kind of reciprocal
benevolence and respect) but rather in making who we are as persons be
constituted in part by those we love (cf., e.g., Rorty 1986/1993;
Nussbaum 1990).



Along
 these lines, Friedman (1998), taking her inspiration in part from
Delaney (1996), argues that we should understand the sort of union at
issue in love to be a kind of *federation* of selves:



> 
> On the federation model, a third unified entity is constituted by the
> interaction of the lovers, one which involves the lovers acting in
> concert across a range of conditions and for a range of purposes. This
> concerted action, however, does not erase the existence of the two
> lovers as separable and separate agents with continuing possibilities
> for the exercise of their own respective agencies. [p. 165]
> 



Given that on this view the lovers do not give up their individual
identities, there is no principled reason why the union view cannot
make sense of the lover's concern for her beloved for his
 sake.[4]
 Moreover, Friedman argues, once we construe union as federation, we
can see that autonomy is not a zero-sum game; rather, love can both
directly enhance the autonomy of each and promote the growth of
various skills, like realistic and critical self-evaluation, that
foster autonomy.



Nonetheless, this federation model is not without its
problems--problems that affect other versions of the union view
as well. For if the federation (or the "we", as on
Nozick's view) is understood as a third entity, we need a
clearer account than has been given of its ontological status and how
it comes to be. Relevant here is the literature on shared intention
and plural subjects. Gilbert (1989, 1996, 2000) has argued that we
should take quite seriously the existence of a plural subject as an
entity over and above its constituent members. Others, such as Tuomela
(1984, 1995), Searle (1990), and Bratman (1999) are more cautious,
treating such talk of "us" having an intention as
metaphorical.


## 3. Love as Robust Concern



As this criticism of the union view indicates, many find caring about
your beloved for her sake to be a part of what it is to love her. The
robust concern view of love takes this to be the central and defining
feature of love (cf. Taylor 1976; Newton-Smith 1989; Soble 1990, 1997;
LaFollette 1996; Frankfurt 1999; White 2001). As Taylor puts it:



> 
> To summarize: if *x* loves *y*
>  then *x* wants to benefit and be with *y* etc., and he
>  has these wants (or at least some of them) because he
>  believes *y* has some determinate characteristics ps in
>  virtue of which he thinks it worth while to benefit and be
>  with *y*. He regards satisfaction of these wants as an end and
>  not as a means towards some other end. [p. 157]
> 



In conceiving of my love for you as constituted by my concern for you
for your sake, the robust concern view rejects the idea, central to
the union view, that love is to be understood in terms of the (literal
or metaphorical) creation of a "we": I am the one who has
this concern for you, though it is nonetheless disinterested and so
not egoistic insofar as it is for your sake rather than for my
 own.[5]



At the heart of the robust concern view is the idea that love
"is neither affective nor cognitive. It is volitional"
(Frankfurt 1999, p. 129; see also Martin 2015). Frankfurt
continues:



> 
> That a person cares about or that he loves something has less to do
> with how things make him feel, or with his opinions about them, than
> with the more or less stable motivational structures that shape his
> preferences and that guide and limit his conduct.
> 



This account analyzes caring about someone for her sake as a matter of
being motivated in certain ways, in part as a response to what happens
to one's beloved. Of course, to understand love in terms of
desires is not to leave other emotional responses out in the cold, for
these emotions should be understood as consequences of desires. Thus,
just as I can be emotionally crushed when one of my strong desires is
disappointed, so too I can be emotionally crushed when things
similarly go badly for my beloved. In this way Frankfurt (1999)
tacitly, and White (2001) more explicitly, acknowledge the way in
which my caring for my beloved for her sake results in my identity
being transformed through her influence insofar as I become vulnerable
to things that happen to her.



Not all robust concern theorists seem to accept this line, however; in
particular, Taylor (1976) and Soble (1990) seem to have a strongly
individualistic conception of persons that prevents my identity being
bound up with my beloved in this sort of way, a kind of view that may
seem to undermine the intuitive "depth" that love seems to
have. (For more on this point, see Rorty 1986/1993.) In the middle is
Stump (2006), who follows Aquinas in understanding love to involve not
only the desire for your beloved's well-being but also a desire
for a certain kind of relationship with your beloved--as a parent
or spouse or sibling or priest or friend, for example--a
relationship within which you share yourself with and connect yourself
to your
 beloved.[6]



One source of worry about the robust concern view is that it involves
too passive an understanding of one's beloved (Ebels-Duggan
2008). The thought is that on the robust concern view the lover merely
tries to discover what the beloved's well-being consists in and
then acts to promote that, potentially by thwarting the
beloved's own efforts when the lover thinks those efforts would
harm her well-being. This, however, would be disrespectful and
demeaning, not the sort of attitude that love is. What robust concern
views seem to miss, Ebels-Duggan suggests, is the way love involves
interacting agents, each with a capacity for autonomy the recognition
and engagement with which is an essential part of love. In response,
advocates of the robust concern view might point out that promoting
someone's well-being normally requires promoting her autonomy
(though they may maintain that this need not always be true: that
paternalism towards a beloved can sometimes be justified and
appropriate as an expression of one's love). Moreover, we might
plausibly think, it is only through the exercise of one's
autonomy that one can define one's own well-being as a person,
so that a lover's failure to respect the beloved's
autonomy would be a failure to promote her well-being and therefore
not an expression of love, contrary to what Ebels-Duggan suggests.
Consequently, it might seem, robust concern views can counter this
objection by offering an enriched conception of what it is to be a
person and so of the well-being of persons.



Another source of worry is that the robust concern view offers too
thin a conception of love. By emphasizing robust concern, this view
understands other features we think characteristic of love, such as
one's emotional responsiveness to one's beloved, to be the
*effects* of that concern rather than constituents of it. Thus
Velleman (1999) argues that robust concern views, by understanding
love merely as a matter of aiming at a particular end (viz., the
welfare of one's beloved), understand love to be merely
conative. However, he claims, love can have nothing to do with
desires, offering as a counterexample the possibility of loving a
troublemaking relation whom you do not want to be with, whose well
being you do not want to promote, etc. Similarly, Badhwar (2003)
argues that such a "teleological" view of love makes it
mysterious how "we can continue to love someone long after death
has taken him beyond harm or benefit" (p. 46). Moreover Badhwar
argues, if love is essentially a desire, then it implies that we lack
something; yet love does not imply this and, indeed, can be felt most
strongly at times when we feel our lives most complete and lacking in
nothing. Consequently, Velleman and Badhwar conclude, love need not
involve any desire or concern for the well-being of one's
beloved.



This conclusion, however, seems too hasty, for such examples can be
accommodated within the robust concern view. Thus, the concern for
your relative in Velleman's example can be understood to be
present but swamped by other, more powerful desires to avoid him.
Indeed, keeping the idea that you want to some degree to benefit him,
an idea Velleman rejects, seems to be essential to understanding the
conceptual tension between loving someone and not wanting to help him,
a tension Velleman does not fully acknowledge. Similarly, continued
love for someone who has died can be understood on the robust concern
view as parasitic on the former love you had for him when he was still
alive: your desires to benefit him get transformed, through your
subsequent understanding of the impossibility of doing so, into
 wishes.[7]
 Finally, the idea of concern for your beloved's well-being need
not imply the idea that you lack something, for such concern can be
understood in terms of the disposition to be vigilant for occasions
when you can come to his aid and consequently to have the relevant
occurrent desires. All of this seems fully compatible with the robust
concern view.



One might also question whether Velleman and Badhwar make proper use
of their examples of loving your meddlesome relation or someone who
has died. For although we can understand these as genuine cases of
love, they are nonetheless *deficient* cases and ought
therefore be understood as parasitic on the standard cases. Readily to
accommodate such deficient cases of love into a philosophical analysis
as being on a par with paradigm cases, and to do so without some
special justification, is dubious.



Nonetheless, the robust concern view as it stands does not seem
properly able to account for the intuitive "depth" of love
and so does not seem properly to distinguish loving from liking.
Although, as noted above, the robust concern view can begin to make
some sense of the way in which the lover's identity is altered
by the beloved, it understands this only an *effect* of love,
and not as a central part of what love consists in.



This vague thought is nicely developed by Wonderly (2017), who
emphasizes that in addition to the sort of disinterested concern for
another that is central to robust-concern accounts of love, an
essential part of at least romantic love is the idea that in loving
someone I must find them to be not merely important for their own sake
but also important *to me*. Wonderly (2017) fleshes out what
this "importance to me" involves in terms of the idea of
attachment (developed in Wonderly 2016) that she argues can make sense
of the intimacy and depth of love from within what remains
fundamentally a robust-concern
 account.[8]


## 4. Love as Valuing



A third kind of view of love understands love to be a distinctive mode
of valuing a person. As the distinction between *eros* and
*agape* in
 Section 1
 indicates, there are at least two ways to construe this in terms of
whether the lover values the beloved because she is valuable, or
whether the beloved comes to be valuable to the lover as a result of
her loving him. The former view, which understands the lover as
*appraising* the value of the beloved in loving him, is the
topic of
 Section 4.1,
 whereas the latter view, which understands her as *bestowing*
value on him, will be discussed in
 Section 4.2.


### 4.1 Love as Appraisal of Value



Velleman (1999, 2008) offers an appraisal view of love, understanding
love to be fundamentally a matter of acknowledging and responding in a
distinctive way to the value of the beloved. (For a very different
appraisal view of love, see Kolodny 2003.) Understanding this more
fully requires understanding both the kind of value of the beloved to
which one responds and the distinctive kind of response to such value
that love is. Nonetheless, it should be clear that what makes an
account be an appraisal view of love is not the mere fact that love is
understood to involve appraisal; many other accounts do so, and it is
typical of robust concern accounts, for example (cf. the quote from
Taylor
 above,
 Section 3). Rather, appraisal views are distinctive in
understanding love to *consist* in that appraisal.



In articulating the kind of value love involves, Velleman, following
Kant, distinguishes dignity from price. To have a *price*, as
the economic metaphor suggests, is to have a value that can be
compared to the value of other things with prices, such that it is
intelligible to exchange without loss items of the same value. By
contrast, to have *dignity* is to have a value such that
comparisons of relative value become meaningless. Material goods are
normally understood to have prices, but we persons have dignity: no
substitution of one person for another can preserve exactly the same
value, for something of incomparable worth would be lost (and gained)
in such a substitution.



On this Kantian view, our dignity as persons consists in our rational
nature: our capacity both to be actuated by reasons that we
autonomously provide ourselves in setting our own ends and to respond
appropriately to the intrinsic values we discover in the world.
Consequently, one important way in which we exercise our rational
natures is to respond with respect to the dignity of other persons (a
dignity that consists in part in their capacity for respect):
*respect* just is the required minimal response to the dignity
of persons. What makes a response to a person be that of respect,
Velleman claims, still following Kant, is that it "arrests our
self-love" and thereby prevents us from treating him as a means
to our ends (p. 360).



Given this, Velleman claims that love is similarly a response to the
dignity of persons, and as such it is the dignity of the object of our
love that justifies that love. However, love and respect are different
kinds of responses to the same value. For love arrests not our
self-love but rather



> 
> our tendencies toward emotional self-protection from another person,
> tendencies to draw ourselves in and close ourselves off from being
> affected by him. Love disarms our emotional defenses; it makes us
> vulnerable to the other. [1999, p. 361]
> 



This means that the concern, attraction, sympathy, etc. that we
normally associate with love are not constituents of love but are
rather its normal effects, and love can remain without them (as in the
case of the love for a meddlesome relative one cannot stand being
around). Moreover, this provides Velleman with a clear account of the
intuitive "depth" of love: it is essentially a response to
persons as such, and to say that you love your dog is therefore to be
confused.



Of course, we do not respond with love to the dignity of every person
we meet, nor are we somehow required to: love, as the disarming of our
emotional defenses in a way that makes us especially vulnerable to
another, is the optional maximal response to others' dignity.
What, then, explains the selectivity of love--why I love some
people and not others? The answer lies in the contingent fit between
the way some people behaviorally express their dignity as persons and
the way I happen to respond to those expressions by becoming
emotionally vulnerable to them. The right sort of fit makes someone
"lovable" by me (1999, p. 372), and my responding with
love in these cases is a matter of my "really seeing" this
person in a way that I fail to do with others who do not fit with me
in this way. By 'lovable' here Velleman seems to mean
*able* to be loved, not *worthy* of being loved, for
nothing Velleman says here speaks to a question about the
justification of my loving this person rather than that. Rather, what
he offers is an *explanation* of the selectivity of my love, an
explanation that as a matter of fact makes my response be that of love
rather than mere respect.



This understanding of the selectivity of love as something that can be
explained but not justified is potentially troubling. For we
ordinarily think we can justify not only my loving you rather than
someone else but also and more importantly the constancy of my love:
my continuing to love you even as you change in certain fundamental
ways (but not others). As Delaney (1996, p. 347) puts the worry about
constancy:



> 
> while you seem to want it to be true that, were you to become a
> schmuck, your lover would continue to love you,...you also want
> it to be the case that your lover would never love a schmuck.
> 



The issue here is not merely that we can offer explanations of the
selectivity of my love, of why I do not love schmucks; rather, at
issue is the *discernment* of love, of loving and continuing to
love for good reasons as well as of ceasing to love for good reasons.
To have these good reasons seems to involve attributing different
values to you now rather than formerly or rather than to someone else,
yet this is precisely what Velleman denies is the case in making the
distinction between love and respect the way he does.



It is also questionable whether Velleman can even explain the
selectivity of love in terms of the "fit" between your
expressions and my sensitivities. For the relevant sensitivities on my
part are emotional sensitivities: the lowering of my emotional
defenses and so becoming emotionally vulnerable to you. Thus, I become
vulnerable to the harms (or goods) that befall you and so
sympathetically feel your pain (or joy). Such emotions are themselves
assessable for warrant, and now we can ask why my disappointment that
you lost the race is warranted, but my being disappointed that a mere
stranger lost would not be warranted. The intuitive answer is that I
love you but not him. However, this answer is unavailable to Velleman,
because he thinks that what makes my response to your dignity that of
love rather than respect is precisely that I feel such emotions, and
to appeal to my love in explaining the emotions therefore seems
viciously circular.



Although these problems are specific to Velleman's account, the
difficulty can be generalized to any appraisal account of love (such
as that offered in Kolodny 2003). For if love is an appraisal, it
needs to be distinguished from other forms of appraisal, including our
evaluative judgments. On the one hand, to try to distinguish love as
an appraisal from other appraisals in terms of love's having
certain effects on our emotional and motivational life (as on
Velleman's account) is unsatisfying because it ignores part of
what needs to be explained: why the appraisal of love has these
effects and yet judgments with the same evaluative content do not.
Indeed, this question is crucial if we are to understand the intuitive
"depth" of love, for without an answer to this question we
do not understand why love should have the kind of centrality in our
lives it manifestly
 does.[9]
 On the other hand, to bundle this emotional component into the
appraisal itself would be to turn the view into either the robust
concern view
 (Section 3)
 or a variant of the emotion view
 (Section 5.1).


### 4.2 Love as Bestowal of Value



In contrast to Velleman, Singer (1991, 1994, 2009) understands love to
be fundamentally a matter of bestowing value on the beloved. To
*bestow* value on another is to project a kind of intrinsic
value onto him. Indeed, this fact about love is supposed to
distinguish love from liking: "Love is an attitude with no clear
objective," whereas liking is inherently teleological (1991, p.
272). As such, there are no standards of correctness for bestowing
such value, and this is how love differs from other personal attitudes
like gratitude, generosity, and condescension:
"love...confers importance no matter *what* the
object is worth" (p. 273). Consequently, Singer thinks, love is
not an attitude that can be justified in any way.



What is it, exactly, to bestow this kind of value on someone? It is,
Singer says, a kind of attachment and commitment to the beloved, in
which one comes to treat him as an end in himself and so to respond to
his ends, interests, concerns, etc. as having value for their own
sake. This means in part that the bestowal of value reveals itself
"by caring about the needs and interests of the beloved, by
wishing to benefit or protect her, by delighting in her
achievements," etc. (p. 270). This sounds very much like the
robust concern view, yet the bestowal view differs in understanding
such robust concern to be the *effect* of the bestowal of value
that is love rather than itself what constitutes love: in bestowing
value on my beloved, I make him be valuable in such a way that I ought
to respond with robust concern.



For it to be intelligible that I have bestowed value on someone, I
must therefore respond appropriately to him as valuable, and this
requires having some sense of what his well-being is and of what
affects that well-being positively or negatively. Yet having this
sense requires in turn knowing what his strengths and deficiencies
are, and this is a matter of appraising him in various ways. Bestowal
thus presupposes a kind of appraisal, as a way of "really
seeing" the beloved and attending to him. Nonetheless, Singer
claims, it is the bestowal that is primary for understanding what love
consists in: the appraisal is required only so that the commitment to
one's beloved and his value as thus bestowed has practical
import and is not "a blind submission to some unknown
being" (1991, p. 272; see also Singer 1994, pp. 139ff).



Singer is walking a tightrope in trying to make room for appraisal in
his account of love. Insofar as the account is fundamentally a
bestowal account, Singer claims that love cannot be justified, that we
bestow the relevant kind of value "gratuitously." This
suggests that love is blind, that it does not matter what our beloved
is like, which seems patently false. Singer tries to avoid this
conclusion by appealing to the role of appraisal: it is only because
we appraise another as having certain virtues and vices that we come
to bestow value on him. Yet the "because" here, since it
cannot justify the bestowal, is at best a kind of contingent causal
explanation.
 [10]
 In this respect, Singer's account of the selectivity of love is
much the same as Velleman's, and it is liable to the same
criticism: it makes unintelligible the way in which our love can be
discerning for better or worse reasons. Indeed, this failure to make
sense of the idea that love can be justified is a problem for any
bestowal view. For either (a) a bestowal itself cannot be justified
(as on Singer's account), in which case the justification of
love is impossible, or (b) a bestowal can be justified, in which case
it is hard to make sense of value as being bestowed rather than there
antecedently in the object as the grounds of that
"bestowal."



More generally, a proponent of the bestowal view needs to be much
clearer than Singer is in articulating precisely what a bestowal is.
What is the value that I create in a bestowal, and how can my bestowal
create it? On a crude Humean view, the answer might be that the value
is something projected onto the world through my pro-attitudes, like
desire. Yet such a view would be inadequate, since the projected
value, being relative to a particular individual, would do no
theoretical work, and the account would essentially be a variant of
the robust concern view. Moreover, in providing a bestowal account of
love, care is needed to distinguish love from other personal attitudes
such as admiration and respect: do these other attitudes involve
bestowal? If so, how does the bestowal in these cases differ from the
bestowal of love? If not, why not, and what is so special about love
that requires a fundamentally different evaluative attitude than
admiration and respect?



Nonetheless, there is a kernel of truth in the bestowal view: there is
surely something right about the idea that love is creative and not
merely a response to antecedent value, and accounts of love that
understand the kind of evaluation implicit in love merely in terms of
appraisal seem to be missing something. Precisely what may be missed
will be discussed below in
 Section 6.


### 4.3 An Intermediate Position?



Perhaps there is room for an understanding of love and its relation to
value that is intermediate between appraisal and bestowal accounts.
After all, if we think of appraisal as something like perception, a
matter of responding to what is out there in the world, and of
bestowal as something like action, a matter of doing something and
creating something, we should recognize that the responsiveness
central to appraisal may itself depend on our active, creative
choices. Thus, just as we must recognize that ordinary perception
depends on our actively directing our attention and deploying
concepts, interpretations, and even arguments in order to perceive
things accurately, so too we might think our vision of our
beloved's valuable properties that is love also depends on our
actively attending to and interpreting him. Something like this is
Jollimore's view (2011). According to Jollimore, in loving
someone we actively attend to his valuable properties in a way that we
take to provide us with reasons to treat him preferentially. Although
we may acknowledge that others might have such properties even to a
greater degree than our beloved does, we do not attend to and
appreciate such properties in others in the same way we do those in
our beloveds; indeed, we find our appreciation of our beloved's
valuable properties to "silence" our similar appreciation
of those in others. (In this way, Jollimore thinks, we can solve the
problem of fungibility, discussed below in
 Section 6.)
 Likewise, in perceiving our beloved's actions and character, we
do so through the lens of such an appreciation, which will tend as to
"silence" interpretations inconsistent with that
appreciation. In this way, love involves finding one's beloved
to be valuable in a way that involves elements of both appraisal
(insofar as one must thereby be responsive to valuable properties
one's beloved really has) and bestowal (insofar as through
one's attention and committed appreciation of these properties
they come to have special significance for one).



One might object that this conception of love as silencing the special
value of others or to negative interpretations of our beloveds is
irrational in a way that love is not. For, it might seem, such
"silencing" is merely a matter of our *blinding*
ourselves to how things really are. Yet Jollimore claims that this
sense in which love is blind is not objectionable, for (a) we can
still intellectually recognize the things that love's vision
silences, and (b) there really is no impartial perspective we can take
on the values things have, and love is one appropriate sort of partial
perspective from which the value of persons can be manifest.
Nonetheless, one might wonder about whether that perspective of love
itself can be distorted and what the norms are in terms of which such
distortions are intelligible. Furthermore, it may seem that
Jollimore's attempt to reconcile appraisal and bestowal fails to
appreciate the underlying metaphysical difficulty: appraisal is a
response to value that is antecedently there, whereas bestowal is the
creation of value that was not antecedently there. Consequently, it
might seem, appraisal and bestowal are mutually exclusive and cannot
be reconciled in the way Jollimore hopes.



Whereas Jollimore tries to combine separate elements of appraisal and
of bestowal in a single account, Helm (2010) and Bagley (2015) offer
accounts that reject the metaphysical presupposition that values must
be either prior to love (as with appraisal) or posterior to love (as
with bestowal), instead understanding the love and the values to
emerge simultaneously. Thus, Helm presents a detailed account of
valuing in terms of the emotions, arguing that while we can understand
individual emotions as *appraisals*, responding to values
already their in their objects, these values are *bestowed* on
those objects via broad, holistic patterns of emotions. How this
amounts to an account of love will be discussed in
 Section 5.2,
 below. Bagley (2015) instead appeals to a metaphor of improvisation,
arguing that just as jazz musicians jointly make determinate the
content of their musical ideas through on-going processes of their
expression, so too lovers *jointly* engage in "deep
improvisation", thereby working out of their values and
identities through the on-going process of living their lives
together. These values are thus something the lovers jointly construct
through the process of recognizing and responding to those very
values. To love someone is thus to engage with them as partners in
such "deep improvisation". (This account is similar to
Helm (2008, 2010)'s account of plural agency, which he uses to
provide an account of friendship and other loving relationships; see
the discussion of
 shared activity
 in the entry on
 friendship.)


## 5. Emotion Views



Given these problems with the accounts of love as valuing, perhaps we
should turn to the emotions. For emotions just are responses to
objects that combine evaluation, motivation, and a kind of
phenomenology, all central features of the attitude of love.



Many accounts of love claim that it is an emotion; these include:
Wollheim 1984, Rorty 1986/1993, Brown 1987, Hamlyn 1989, Baier 1991,
and Badhwar
 2003.[11]
 Thus, Hamlyn (1989, p. 219) says:



> 
> It would not be a plausible move to defend any theory of the emotions
> to which love and hate seemed exceptions by saying that love and hate
> are after all not emotions. I have heard this said, but it does seem
> to me a desperate move to make. If love and hate are not emotions what
> is?
> 



The difficulty with this claim, as Rorty (1980) argues, is that the
word, 'emotion,' does not seem to pick out a homogeneous
collection of mental states, and so various theories claiming that
love is an emotion mean very different things. Consequently, what are
here labeled "emotion views" are divided into those that
understand love to be a particular kind of evaluative-cum-motivational
response to an object, whether that response is merely occurrent or
dispositional ('emotions proper,' see
 Section 5.1,
 below), and those that understand love to involve a collection of
related and interconnected emotions proper ('emotion
complexes,' see
 Section 5.2,
 below).


### 5.1 Love as Emotion Proper



An *emotion proper* is a kind of
"evaluative-cum-motivational response to an object"; what
does this mean? Emotions are generally understood to have several
objects. The *target* of an emotion is that at which the
emotion is directed: if I am afraid or angry at you, then you are the
target. In responding to you with fear or anger, I am implicitly
evaluating you in a particular way, and this evaluation--called
the *formal object*--is the kind of evaluation of the
target that is distinctive of a particular emotion type. Thus, in
fearing you, I implicitly evaluate you as somehow dangerous, whereas
in being angry at you I implicitly evaluate you as somehow offensive.
Yet emotions are not merely evaluations of their targets; they in part
motivate us to behave in certain ways, both rationally (by motivating
action to avoid the danger) and arationally (via certain
characteristic expressions, such as slamming a door out of anger).
Moreover, emotions are generally understood to involve a
phenomenological component, though just how to understand the
characteristic "feel" of an emotion and its relation to
the evaluation and motivation is hotly disputed. Finally, emotions are
typically understood to be passions: responses that we feel imposed on
us as if from the outside, rather than anything we actively do. (For
more on the philosophy of emotions, see entry on
 emotion.)



What then are we saying when we say that love is an emotion proper?
According to Brown (1987, p. 14), emotions as occurrent mental states
are "abnormal bodily changes caused by the agent's
evaluation or appraisal of some object or situation that the agent
believes to be of concern to him or her." He spells this out by
saying that in love, we "cherish" the person for having
"a particular complex of instantiated qualities" that is
"open-ended" so that we can continue to love the person
even as she changes over time (pp. 106-7). These qualities,
which include historical and relational qualities, are evaluated in
love as
 worthwhile.[12]
 All of this seems aimed at spelling out what love's formal
object is, a task that is fundamental to understanding love as an
emotion proper. Thus, Brown seems to say that love's formal
object is just being worthwhile (or, given his examples, perhaps:
worthwhile as a person), and he resists being any more specific than
this in order to preserve the open-endedness of love. Hamlyn (1989)
offers a similar account, saying (p. 228):



> 
> With love the difficulty is to find anything of this kind [i.e., a
> formal object] which is uniquely appropriate to love. My thesis is
> that there is nothing of this kind that must be so, and that this
> differentiates it and hate from the other emotions.
> 



Hamlyn goes on to suggest that love and hate might be primordial
emotions, a kind of positive or negative "feeling
towards," presupposed by all other
 emotions.[13]



The trouble with these accounts of love as an emotion proper is that
they provide too thin a conception of love. In Hamlyn's case,
love is conceived as a fairly generic pro-attitude, rather than as the
specific kind of distinctively *personal* attitude discussed
here. In Brown's case, spelling out the formal object of love as
simply being worthwhile (as a person) fails to distinguish love from
other evaluative responses like admiration and respect. Part of the
problem seems to be the rather simple account of what an emotion is
that Brown and Hamlyn use as their starting point: if love is an
emotion, then the understanding of what an emotion is must be enriched
considerably to accommodate love. Yet it is not at all clear whether
the idea of an "emotion proper" can be adequately enriched
so as to do so. As Pismenny & Prinz (2017) point out, love seems
to be too varied both in its ground and in the sort of experience it
involves to be capturable by a single emotion.


### 5.2 Love as Emotion Complex



The emotion complex view, which understands love to be a complex
emotional attitude towards another person, may initially seem to hold
out great promise to overcome the problems of alternative types of
views. By articulating the emotional interconnections between persons,
it could offer a satisfying account of the "depth" of love
without the excesses of the union view and without the overly narrow
teleological focus of the robust concern view; and because these
emotional interconnections are themselves evaluations, it could offer
an understanding of love as simultaneously evaluative, without needing
to specify a single formal object of love. However, the devil is in
the details.



Rorty
 (1986/1993) does not try to present a complete account of love;
rather, she focuses on the idea that "relational psychological
attitudes" which, like love, essentially involve emotional and
desiderative responses, exhibit *historicity*: "they
arise from, and are shaped by, dynamic interactions between a subject
and an object" (p. 73). In part this means that what makes an
attitude be one of love is not the presence of a state that we can
point to at a particular time within the lover; rather, love is to be
"identified by a characteristic narrative history" (p.
75). Moreover, Rorty argues, the historicity of love involves the
lover's being permanently transformed by loving who he does.



Baier (1991), seeming to pick up on this understanding of love as
exhibiting historicity, says (p. 444):



> 
> Love is not just an emotion people feel toward other people, but also
> a complex tying together of the emotions that two or a few more people
> have; it is a special form of emotional interdependence.
> 



To a certain extent, such emotional interdependence involves feeling
sympathetic emotions, so that, for example, I feel disappointed and
frustrated on behalf of my beloved when she fails, and joyful when she
succeeds. However, Baier insists, love is "more than just the
duplication of the emotion of each in a sympathetic echo in the
other" (p. 442); the emotional interdependence of the lovers
involves also appropriate follow-up responses to the emotional
predicaments of your beloved. Two examples Baier gives (pp.
443-44) are a feeling of "mischievous delight" at
your beloved's temporary bafflement, and amusement at her
embarrassment. The idea is that in a loving relationship your beloved
gives you permission to feel such emotions when no one else is
permitted to do so, and a condition of her granting you that
permission is that you feel these emotions "tenderly."
Moreover, you ought to respond emotionally to your beloved's
emotional responses to you: by feeling hurt when she is indifferent to
you, for example. All of these foster the sort of emotional
interdependence Baier is after--a kind of intimacy you have with
your beloved.



Badhwar (2003, p. 46) similarly understands love to be a matter of
"one's overall emotional orientation towards a
person--the complex of perceptions, thoughts, and
feelings"; as such, love is a matter of having a certain
"character structure." Central to this complex emotional
orientation, Badhwar thinks, is what she calls the "look of
love": "an ongoing [emotional] affirmation of the loved
object as worthy of existence...for her own sake" (p. 44),
an affirmation that involves taking pleasure in your beloved's
well-being. Moreover, Badhwar claims, the look of love also provides
to the beloved reliable testimony concerning the quality of the
beloved's character and actions (p. 57).



There is surely something very right about the idea that love, as an
attitude central to deeply personal relationships, should not be
understood as a state that can simply come and go. Rather, as the
emotion complex view insists, the complexity of love is to be found in
the historical patterns of one's emotional responsiveness to
one's beloved--a pattern that also projects into the
future. Indeed, as suggested above, the kind of emotional
interdependence that results from this complex pattern can seem to
account for the intuitive "depth" of love as fully
interwoven into one's emotional sense of oneself. And it seems
to make some headway in understanding the complex phenomenology of
love: love can at times be a matter of intense pleasure in the
presence of one's beloved, yet it can at other times involve
frustration, exasperation, anger, and hurt as a manifestation of the
complexities and depth of the relationships it fosters.



This understanding of love as constituted by a history of emotional
interdependence enables emotion complex views to say something
interesting about the impact love has on the lover's identity.
This is partly Rorty's point (1986/1993) in her discussion of
the historicity of love
 (above).
 Thus, she argues, one important feature of such historicity is that
love is "*dynamically permeable*" in that the lover
is continually "changed by loving" such that these changes
"tend to ramify through a person's character" (p.
77). Through such dynamic permeability, love transforms the identity
of the lover in a way that can sometimes foster the continuity of the
love, as each lover continually changes in response to the changes in
the
 other.[14]
 Indeed, Rorty concludes, love should be understood in terms of
"a characteristic narrative history" (p. 75) that results
from such dynamic permeability. It should be clear, however, that the
mere fact of dynamic permeability need not result in the love's
continuing: nothing about the dynamics of a relationship requires that
the characteristic narrative history project into the future, and such
permeability can therefore lead to the dissolution of the love. Love
is therefore risky--indeed, all the more risky because of the way
the identity of the lover is defined in part through the love. The
loss of a love can therefore make one feel no longer oneself in ways
poignantly described by Nussbaum (1990).



By focusing on such emotionally complex histories, emotion complex
views differ from most alternative accounts of love. For alternative
accounts tend to view love as a kind of attitude we take toward our
beloveds, something we can analyze simply in terms of our mental state
at the
 moment.[15]
 By ignoring this historical dimension of love in providing an account
of what love is, alternative accounts have a hard time providing
either satisfying accounts of the sense in which our identities as
person are at stake in loving another or satisfactory solutions to
problems concerning how love is to be justified (cf.
 Section 6,
 especially the discussion of
 fungibility).



Nonetheless, some questions remain. If love is to be understood as an
emotion complex, we need a much more explicit account of the pattern
at issue here: what ties all of these emotional responses together
into a single thing, namely love? Baier and Badhwar seem content to
provide interesting and insightful examples of this pattern, but that
does not seem to be enough. For example, what connects my amusement at
my beloved's embarrassment to other emotions like my joy on his
behalf when he succeeds? Why shouldn't my amusement at his
embarrassment be understood instead as a somewhat cruel case of
*schadenfreude* and so as antithetical to, and disconnected
from, love? Moreover, as Naar (2013) notes, we need a principled
account of when such historical patterns are disrupted in such a way
as to end the love and when they are not. Do I stop loving when, in
the midst of clinical depression, I lose my normal pattern of
emotional concern?



Presumably the answer requires returning to the historicity of love:
it all depends on the historical details of the relationship my
beloved and I have forged. Some loves develop so that the intimacy
within the relationship is such as to allow for tender, teasing
responses to each other, whereas other loves may not. The historical
details, together with the lovers' understanding of their
relationship, presumably determine which emotional responses belong to
the pattern constitutive of love and which do not. However, this
answer so far is inadequate: not just any historical relationship
involving emotional interdependence is a loving relationship, and we
need a principled way of distinguishing loving relationships from
other relational evaluative attitudes: precisely what is the
characteristic narrative history that is characteristic of love?



Helm (2009, 2010) tries to answer some of these questions in
presenting an account of love as intimate identification. To love
another, Helm claims, is to care about him as the particular person he
is and so, other things being equal, to value the things he values.
Insofar as a person's (structured) set of values--his sense
of the kind of life worth his living--constitutes his
*identity* as a person, such sharing of values amounts to
sharing his identity, which sounds very much like union accounts of
love. However, Helm is careful to understand such sharing of values as
for the sake of the beloved (as robust concern accounts insist), and
he spells this all out in terms of patterns of emotions. Thus, Helm
claims, all emotions have not only a target and a formal object (as
indicated above), but also a *focus*: a background object the
subject cares about in terms of which the implicit evaluation of the
target is made intelligible. (For example, if I am afraid of the
approaching hailstorm, I thereby evaluate it as dangerous, and what
explains this evaluation is the way that hailstorm bears on my
vegetable garden, which I care about; my garden, therefore, is the
focus of my fear.) Moreover, emotions normally come in patterns with a
common focus: fearing the hailstorm is normally connected to other
emotions as being relieved when it passes by harmlessly (or
disappointed or sad when it does not), being angry at the rabbits for
killing the spinach, delighted at the productivity of the tomato
plants, etc. Helm argues that a projectible pattern of such emotions
with a common focus constitute caring about that focus. Consequently,
we might say along the lines of
 Section 4.3,
 while particular emotions appraise events in the world as having
certain evaluative properties, their having these properties is partly
bestowed on them by the overall patterns of emotions.



Helm identifies some emotions as *person-focused emotions*:
emotions like pride and shame that essentially take persons as their
focuses, for these emotions implicitly evaluate in terms of the
target's bearing on the quality of life of the person that is
their focus. To exhibit a pattern of such emotions focused on oneself
and subfocused on being a mother, for example, is to care about the
place being a mother has in the kind of life you find worth
living--in your identity as a person; to care in this way is to
*value* being a mother as a part of your concern for your own
identity. Likewise, to exhibit a projectible pattern of such emotions
focused on someone else and subfocused on his being a father is to
value this as a part of your concern for *his*
identity--to value it for *his* sake. Such sharing of
another's values for his sake, which, Helm argues, essentially
involves trust, respect, and affection, amounts to *intimate
identification* with him, and such intimate identification just is
love. Thus, Helm tries to provide an account of love that is grounded
in an explicit account of caring (and caring about something for the
sake of someone else) that makes room for the intuitive
"depth" of love through intimate identification.



Jaworska & Wonderly (2017) argue that Helm's construal of
intimacy as intimate identification is too demanding. Rather, they
argue, the sort of intimacy that distinguishes love from mere caring
is one that involves a kind of emotional vulnerability in which things
going well or poorly for one's beloved are directly connected
not merely to one's well-being, but to one's ability to
flourish. This connection, they argue, runs through the lover's
self-understanding and the place the beloved has in the lover's
sense of a meaningful life.


## 6. The Value and Justification of Love



Why do we love? It has been suggested above that any account of love
needs to be able to answer some such justificatory question. Although
the issue of the justification of love is important on its own, it is
also important for the implications it has for understanding more
clearly the precise object of love: how can we make sense of the
intuitions not only that we love the individuals themselves rather
than their properties, but also that my beloved is not
fungible--that no one could simply take her place without loss.
Different theories approach these questions in different ways, but, as
will become clear below, the question of justification is primary.



One way to understand the question of why we love is as asking for
what the value of love is: what do we get out of it? One kind of
answer, which has its roots in Aristotle, is that having loving
relationships promotes self-knowledge insofar as your beloved acts as
a kind of mirror, reflecting your character back to you (Badhwar,
2003, p. 58). Of course, this answer presupposes that we cannot
accurately know ourselves in other ways: that left alone, our sense of
ourselves will be too imperfect, too biased, to help us grow and
mature as persons. The metaphor of a mirror also suggests that our
beloveds will be in the relevant respects similar to us, so that
merely by observing them, we can come to know ourselves better in a
way that is, if not free from bias, at least more objective than
otherwise.



Brink (1999, pp. 264-65) argues that there are serious limits to
the value of such mirroring of one's self in a beloved. For if
the aim is not just to know yourself better but to *improve*
yourself, you ought also to interact with others who are not just like
yourself: interacting with such diverse others can help you recognize
alternative possibilities for how to live and so better assess the
relative merits of these possibilities. Whiting (2013) also emphasizes
the importance of our beloveds' having an independent voice
capable of reflecting not who one now is but an ideal for who one is
to be. Nonetheless, we need not take the metaphor of the mirror quite
so literally; rather, our beloveds can reflect our selves not through
their inherent similarity to us but rather through the interpretations
they offer of us, both explicitly and implicitly in their responses to
us. This is what Badhwar calls the "epistemic
significance" of
 love.[16]



In addition to this epistemic significance of love, LaFollette (1996,
Chapter 5) offers several other reasons why it is good to love,
reasons derived in part from the psychological literature on love:
love increases our sense of well-being, it elevates our sense of
self-worth, and it serves to develop our character. It also, we might
add, tends to lower stress and blood pressure and to increase health
and longevity. Friedman (1993) argues that the kind of partiality
towards our beloveds that love involves is itself *morally*
valuable because it supports relationships--loving
relationships--that contribute "to human well-being,
integrity, and fulfillment in life" (p. 61). And Solomon (1988,
p. 155) claims:



> 
> Ultimately, there is only one reason for love. That one grand
> reason...is "because we bring out the best in each
> other." What counts as "the best," of course, is
> subject to much individual variation.
> 



This is because, Solomon suggests, in loving someone, I want myself to
be better so as to be worthy of his love for me.



Each of these answers to the question of why we love understands it to
be asking about love quite generally, abstracted away from details of
particular relationships. It is also possible to understand the
question as asking about particular loves. Here, there are several
questions that are relevant:


1. What, if anything, justifies my loving rather than not loving this particular person?
2. What, if anything, justifies my coming to love this particular person rather than someone else?
3. What, if anything, justifies my continuing to love this particular person given the changes--both in him and me and in the overall circumstances--that have occurred since I began loving him?



These are importantly different questions. Velleman (1999), for
example, thinks we can answer (1) by appealing to the fact that my
beloved is a person and so has a rational nature, yet he thinks (2)
and (3) have no answers: the best we can do is offer causal
explanations for our loving particular people, a position echoed by
Han (2021). Setiya (2014) similarly thinks (1) has an answer, but
points not to the rational nature of persons but rather to the
other's *humanity*, where such humanity differs from
personhood in that not all humans need have the requisite rational
nature for personhood, and not all persons need be humans. And, as
will become clear
 below,
 the distinction between (2) and (3) will become important in
resolving puzzles concerning whether our beloveds are fungible, though
it should be clear that (3) potentially raises questions concerning
 personal identity
 (which will not be addressed here).



It is important not to misconstrue these justificatory questions.
 Thomas (1991),
 for example, rejects the idea that love can be justified:
"there are no rational considerations whereby anyone can lay
claim to another's love or insist that an individual's
love for another is irrational" (p. 474). This is because,
Thomas claims (p. 471):



> 
> no matter how wonderful and lovely an individual might be, on any and
> all accounts, it is simply false that a romantically unencumbered
> person must love that individual on pain of being irrational. Or,
> there is no irrationality involved in ceasing to love a person whom
> one once loved immensely, although the person has not changed.
> 



However, as LaFollette (1996, p. 63) correctly points out,



> 
> reason is not some external power which dictates how we should behave,
> but an internal power, integral to who we are.... Reason does not
> command that we love anyone. Nonetheless, reason is vital in
> determining whom we love and why we love them.
> 



That is, reasons for love are *pro tanto*: they are a part of
the overall reasons we have for acting, and it is up to us in
exercising our capacity for agency to decide what on balance we have
reason to do or even whether we shall act contrary to our reasons. To
construe the notion of a reason for love as compelling us to love, as
Thomas does, is to misconstrue the place such reasons have within our
 agency.[17]



Most philosophical discussions of the justification of love focus on
question
 (1),
 thinking that answering this question will also, to the extent that
we can, answer question
 (2),
 which is typically not distinguished from
 (3).
 The answers given to these questions vary in a way that turns on how
the kind of evaluation implicit in love is construed. On the one hand,
those who understand the evaluation implicit in love to be a matter of
the bestowal of value (such as Telfer 1970-71; Friedman 1993;
Singer 1994) typically claim that no justification can be given (cf.
 Section 4.2).
 As indicated above, this seems problematic, especially given the
importance love can have both in our lives and, especially, in shaping
our identities as persons. To reject the idea that we can love for
reasons may reduce the impact our agency can have in defining who we
are.



On the other hand, those who understand the evaluation implicit in
love to be a matter of appraisal tend to answer the justificatory
question by appeal to these valuable properties of the beloved. This
acceptance of the idea that love can be justified leads to two
further, related worries about the object of love.



The
 first worry is raised by Vlastos (1981) in a discussion Plato's
and Aristotle's accounts of love. Vlastos notes that these
accounts focus on the *properties* of our beloveds: we are to
love people, they say, only because and insofar as they are
objectifications of the excellences. Consequently, he argues, in doing
so they fail to distinguish "*disinterested*
*affection for the person* we love" from
"*appreciation of the excellences instantiated by that*
*person*" (p. 33). That is, Vlastos thinks that Plato and
Aristotle provide an account of love that is really a love of
properties rather than a love of persons--love of a *type*
of person, rather than love of a particular person--thereby
losing what is distinctive about love as an essentially
*personal* attitude. This worry about Plato and Aristotle might
seem to apply just as well to other accounts that justify love in
terms of the properties of the person: insofar as we love the person
for the sake of her properties, it might seem that what we love is
those properties and not the person. Here it is surely insufficient to
say, as Solomon (1988, p. 154) does, "if love has its reasons,
then it is not the whole person that one loves but certain aspects of
that person--though the rest of the person comes along too, of
course": that final tagline fails to address the central
difficulty about what the object of love is and so about love as a
distinctly personal attitude. (Clausen 2019 might seem to address this
worry by arguing that we love people not as having certain properties
but rather as having "*organic unities*": a
holistic set of properties the value of each of which must be
understood in essential part in terms of its place within that whole.
Nonetheless, while this is an interesting and plausible way to think
about the value of the properties of persons, that organic unity
itself will be a (holistic) property held by the person, and it seems
that the fundamental problem reemerges at the level of this holistic
property: do we love the holistic unity rather than the person?)



The second worry concerns the fungibility of the object of love. To be
*fungible* is to be replaceable by another relevantly similar
object without any loss of value. Thus, money is fungible: I can give
you two $5 bills in exchange for a $10 bill, and neither of us has
lost anything. Is the object of love fungible? That is, can I simply
switch from loving one person to loving another relevantly similar
person without any loss? The worry about fungibility is commonly put
this way: if we accept that love can be justified by appealing to
properties of the beloved, then it may seem that in loving someone for
certain reasons, I love him not simply as the individual he is, but as
instantiating those properties. And this may imply that any other
person instantiating those same properties would do just as well: my
beloved would be fungible. Indeed, it may be that another person
exhibits the properties that ground my love to a greater degree than
my current beloved does, and so it may seem that in such a case I have
reason to "trade up"--to switch my love to the new,
better person. However, it seems clear that the objects of our loves
are not fungible: love seems to involve a deeply personal commitment
to a particular person, a commitment that is antithetical to the idea
that our beloveds are fungible or to the idea that we ought to be
willing to trade up when
 possible.[18]



In
 responding to these worries, Nozick (1989) appeals to the union view
of love he endorses (see the section on
 Love as Union):



> 
> The intention in love is to form a *we* and to identify with it
> as an extended self, to identify one's fortunes in large part
> with its fortunes. A willingness to trade up, to destroy the very
> *we* you largely identify with, would then be a willingness to
> destroy your self in the form of your own extended self. [p. 78]
> 



So it is because love involves forming a "we" that we must
understand other persons and not properties to be the objects of love,
and it is because my very identity as a person depends essentially on
that "we" that it is not possible to substitute without
loss one object of my love for another. However, Badhwar (2003)
criticizes Nozick, saying that his response implies that once I love
someone, I cannot abandon that love no matter who that person becomes;
this, she says, "cannot be understood as love at all rather than
addiction" (p.
 61).[19]



Instead, Badhwar (1987) turns to her robust-concern account of love as
a concern for the beloved for *his* sake rather than
one's own. Insofar as my love is *disinterested* --
not a means to antecedent ends of my own--it would be senseless
to think that my beloved could be replaced by someone who is able to
satisfy my ends equally well or better. Consequently, my beloved is in
this way irreplaceable. However, this is only a partial response to
the worry about fungibility, as Badhwar herself seems to acknowledge.
For the concern over fungibility arises not merely for those cases in
which we think of love as justified instrumentally, but also for those
cases in which the love is justified by the intrinsic value of the
properties of my beloved. Confronted with cases like this, Badhwar
(2003) concludes that the object of love is fungible after all (though
she insists that it is very unlikely in practice). (Soble (1990,
Chapter 13) draws similar conclusions.)



Nonetheless, Badhwar thinks that the object of love is
"phenomenologically non-fungible" (2003, p. 63; see also
1987, p. 14). By this she means that we *experience* our
beloveds to be irreplaceable: "loving and delighting in [one
person] are not completely commensurate with loving and delighting in
another" (1987, p. 14). Love can be such that we sometimes
desire to be with this particular person whom we love, not another
whom we also love, for our loves are qualitatively different. But why
is this? It seems as though the typical reason I now want to spend
time with Amy rather than Bob is, for example, that Amy is funny but
Bob is not. I love Amy in part for her humor, and I love Bob for other
reasons, and these qualitative differences between them is what makes
them not fungible. However, this reply does not address the worry
about the possibility of trading up: if Bob were to be at least as
funny (charming, kind, etc.) as Amy, why shouldn't I dump her
and spend all my time with him?



A somewhat different approach is taken by Whiting (1991). In response
to the first worry concerning the object of love, Whiting argues that
Vlastos offers a false dichotomy: having affection for someone that is
*disinterested*--for her sake rather than my
own--essentially involves an appreciation of her excellences as
such. Indeed, Whiting says, my appreciation of these as excellences,
and so the underlying commitment I have to their value, just
*is* a disinterested commitment to her because these
excellences constitute her identity as the person she is. The person,
therefore, really is the object of love. Delaney (1996) takes the
complementary tack of distinguishing between the *object* of
one's love, which of course is the person, and the
*grounds* of the love, which are her properties: to say, as
Solomon does, that we love someone for reasons is not at all to say
that we only love certain aspects of the person. In these terms, we
might say that Whiting's rejection of Vlastos' dichotomy
can be read as saying that what makes my attitude be one of
*disinterested* affection--one of love--for the
person is precisely that I am thereby responding to her excellences as
the reasons for that
 affection.[20]



Of course, more needs to be said about what it is that makes a
particular person be the object of love. Implicit in Whiting's
account is an understanding of the way in which the object of my love
is determined in part by the history of interactions I have with her:
it is she, and not merely her properties (which might be instantiated
in many different people), that I want to be with; it is she, and not
merely her properties, on whose behalf I am concerned when she suffers
and whom I seek to comfort; etc. This addresses the first worry, but
not the second worry about fungibility, for the question still remains
whether she is the object of my love only as instantiating certain
properties, and so whether or not I have reason to "trade
up."



To
 respond to the fungibility worry, Whiting and Delaney appeal
explicitly to the historical
 relationship.[21]
 Thus, Whiting claims, although there may be a relatively large pool
of people who have the kind of excellences of character that would
justify my loving them, and so although there can be no answer to
question
 (2)
 about why I come to love this rather than that person within this
pool, once I have come to love this person and so have developed a
historical relation with her, this history of concern justifies my
continuing to love this person rather than someone else (1991, p. 7).
Similarly, Delaney claims that love is grounded in
"historical-relational properties" (1996, p. 346), so that
I have reasons for continuing to love this person rather than
switching allegiances and loving someone else. In each case, the
appeal to both such historical relations and the excellences of
character of my beloved is intended to provide an answer to question
 (3),
 and this explains why the objects of love are not fungible.



There seems to be something very much right with this response.
Relationships grounded in love are essentially personal, and it would
be odd to think of what justifies that love to be merely
non-relational properties of the beloved. Nonetheless, it is still
unclear how the historical-relational propreties can provide any
additional justification for subsequent concern beyond that which is
already provided (as an answer to question
 (1))
 by appeal to the excellences of the beloved's character (cf.
Brink 1999). The mere fact that I have loved someone in the past does
not seem to *justify* my continuing to love him in the future.
When we imagine that he is going through a rough time and begins to
lose the virtues justifying my initial love for him, why
shouldn't I dump him and instead come to love someone new having
all of those virtues more fully? Intuitively (unless the change she
undergoes makes her in some important sense no longer the same person
he was), we think I should not dump him, but the appeal to the mere
fact that I loved him in the past is surely not enough. Yet what
historical-relational properties could do the trick? (For an
interesting attempt at an answer, see Kolodny 2003 and also Howard
2019.)



If we think that love can be justified, then it may seem that the
appeal to particular historical facts about a loving relationship to
justify that love is inadequate, for such idiosyncratic and subjective
properties might *explain* but cannot *justify* love.
Rather, it may seem, justification in general requires appealing to
universal, objective properties. But such properties are ones that
others might share, which leads to the problem of fungibility.
Consequently it may seem that love cannot be justified. In the face of
this predicament, accounts of love that understand love to be an
attitude towards value that is intermediate between appraisal and
bestowal, between recognizing already existing value and creating that
value (see
 Section 4.3)
 might seem to offer a way out. For once we reject the thought that
the value of our beloveds must be either the precondition or the
consequence of our love, we have room to acknowledge that the deeply
personal, historically grounded, creative nature of love (central to
bestowal accounts) and the understanding of love as responsive to
valuable properties of the beloved that can justify that love (central
to appraisal accounts) are not mutually exclusive (Helm 2010; Bagley
2015).