Philosophers on Love II

Love as Robust Concern
Some philosophers think that the most essential element in love is caring about your beloved for her own sake and it is this which is the most central and defining quality of love.(cf. G Taylor, “Love”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1976:147–64; W Newton-Smith, W. “A Conceptual Investigation of Love”, in A Soble (ed)  Eros, Agape, and Philia: Readings in the Philosophy of Love, 1989, 199–217 ; The Structure of Love, 1990, “Union, Autonomy, and Concern”, in R E Lamb (ed.) Love Analyzed (1997), 65–92.; H LaFollette,  Personal Relationships: Love, Identity,
and Morality,1996; H Frankfurt “Autonomy, Necessity, and Love”, in Necessity, Volition, and Love, 1999 129–41; 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 ψ 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 this view, love is not to be understood as the literal or metaphorical creation of a "we" because my concern for the beloved, though for the sake of the beloved and thus not egoistic, is still my concern. Love is thus neither affective nor cognitive but volitional (Frankfurt 1999, p. 129) : "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." All the other emotions are understood in terms of desires. I can thus be emotionally crushed when one of my strong desires is disappointed and equally crushed when things 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 will transform my identity through her influence insofar as I become vulnerable to things that happen to her. But Taylor (1976) and Soble (The Structure of Love 1990) refuse to see one's identity being bound up with his beloved in this sort of way. In the middle is E Stump ( “Love by All Accounts”, Presidential Address to the Central APA, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 80:25–43. (2006). He follows Aquinas in thinking that love involves not only a desire for your beloved's well-being but also a desire for a certain kind of relationship with your beloved .e.g. 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.

Some philosopher criticize this robust concern view because by overemphasizing such robust concern, one's own emotional responsiveness to one's beloved will be treated as  merely the effects of that concern rather than part of what it means to love someone. Thus J D. Velleman ( “Love as a Moral Emotion”,Ethics, 109 : 338 -74 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), makes love merely
conative.  Velleman thinks that it is also possible that love may have nothing to do with desires to benefit the beloved  e.g we may sometimes still have a love relation (by act or conduct) with a troublemaking relative who is someone whom we do not want to be with and whose well being we do not really desire or want to promote, etc.  N. K Badhwar also ( “Friends as Ends in Themselves”, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, 48:1–23.(2003) asks how  “we can continue to love someone long after death has taken him beyond harm or benefit” (p. 46) if we think that caring for the welfare of the beloved is essential to the love relations . Moreover they argue that if love is essentially just a desire for someone's benefit, then it implies that we lack something; yet love does not necessarily imply this and, indeed, can be felt most strongly at times when we feel our lives most complete and lacking in
nothing. Thus Velleman and Badhwar conclude, love need not involve any desire or concern for the well-being of one's beloved! But to Helm, such objection are not unanswerable: one may feel concern for your relative in Velleman's example but such feeling may be swamped by other, more powerful desires to avoid him. We may often want to benefit a troublesome relative although we may not otherwise love him or alternatively we may love someone without wanting or desiring to help him.We may also  explain why we love a dead relative although it is no longer necessary for us to be concerned for his welfare as a kind of residual emotion parasitic on the former love you had for him when he was still alive: your desires to benefit him in such a case get transformed after his death into pure wishes and desires. It may also be argued that 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 possible future cases when we can come to his aid and consequently to have the relevant desires. All of this seems fully compatible with
the robust concern view. In addition, Helm queries if  Velleman and Badhwar's examples of meddlesome relation or s a dead beloved are typical cases or merely atypical deficient cases. To Helm, they ought therefore be treated 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"says Helm. As it stands, robust concern view does not seem able to account for the intuitive “depth” of love and so does not seem to properly distinguish loving from liking. Although the robust concern view can make some sense of the way in which the lover's identity is altered by the beloved, it understands this only as an effect of love, and not as a central part of what love consists in.

Love as a kind of Valuing
A third theory of the nature of love is the view that love is a distinctive mode of valuing a person. As the distinction between eros and agape explained above, there are at least two ways to construe this in terms of whether 
(a) the lover values the beloved because she is valuable in herself in which case, the lover confers value on the beloved  or 
(b) whether the beloved becomes valuable to the lover only as a result her loving him. The former view which understands the lover as appraising the value of the beloved in loving him and the latter view which understands her as bestowing value on him will be discussed below.

(a) Love as appraisal of value
Velleman (1999, 2008) thinks that love is 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 N Kolodny, “Love as Valuing a Relationship”, The Philosophical Review, 112:135–89.2003.) However, love may involve not merely appraisal but also robust concern for the beloved e.g the quote from  Taylor above.
However what makes the appraisal views special is that it considers love to consist in that appraisal.

To what kind of value of the beloved does the lover  responds and what marks the nature of such a response? Like Kant, Velleman thinks that it is important that we distinguish between the value of a person from his market price (a price is a value that can be compared to the value of other equivalent items or things in the market with prices which can be mutually exchanged or which are interchangeable without much loss in value). By contrast, "to have dignity is to have a value such that
comparisons of relative value become meaningless." Material goods have prices, but only human beings 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." To Kant, our dignity as persons consists in our rationalnature: our capacity both to be actuated by reasons that we autonomously provide ourselves in setting our own goals or ends and to respond appropriately to the intrinsic values we discover in the world. e.g to the dignity of other persons who also possess similar capacities for mutual respect), respect being the minimal response we accord to the the dignity of a human person i.e. not to treat others as a means to our ends (p. 360).Velleman claims it is the dignity of our beloved that justifies that love. But whereas respect merely arrests our self-love, love arrests "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]" What this means is 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). "  This explains the intuitive “depth” of love: it is essentially a response to persons as such. Thus to say you love your dog is to be
confused. A dog simply does not have the kind of dignity due to a human being.

Helms says that "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. Rather, what he offers is an explanation of the selectivity of my love, an explanation that as a matter of fact makes my response that of love rather than that of mere respect.

To Helm, merely being able to explain "the selectivity of love" but not being able to justify why we should love or continue to love one person but not another is "potentially troubling" because we ordinarily think we should be able to justify not only why John should love  Mary and not Martha but also and more importantly why John should remain faithful to Mary as she  changes in certain fundamental ways (but not others). As Delaney (1996, p. 347) puts it, the difficulty about constancy is that "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 question is not merely that we 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 Helm, to "have these good reasons seems to involve attributing different values to you now rather than to you formerly or to you 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." Helm also queries whether Velleman can properly explain even "the selectivity of love in terms of the “fit” between your expressions and my sensitivities" because "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."

To Helm, 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; "if love is an appraisal, it needs to be distinguished from other forms of appraisal, including our evaluative judgments" but 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. On the other hand, to bundle this emotional component into the appraisal itself would be to turn the view into either the robust
concernview or a variant of the emotion view to be discussed below.

(b) Love as Bestowal of Value
In contrast to Velleman, Singer (1991, 1994, 2009) thinks that love is fundamentally a matter of bestowing value on the beloved. ( ie. to project a kind of intrinsic value onto her and of getting attached and committed to the beloved and to treat her as an end in herself and so to respond to her ends, interests and concerns etc. as having value for their own sake manifested by "caring about what his beloved needs and interests, by wishing to benefit and protect her and by delighting in what delighting in her achievements" etc. 1991 p 270): something which distinguishes love from liking: “Love is an attitude with no clear objective,” whereas liking is inherently teleological "(1991, p. 272). As such, there are no set criteria of correctness for bestowing
such value. 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). Thus he thinks that "love is not an attitude that can be justified in any way." This looks remarkably like the robust concern view of love except that Singer thinks that showing such robust concern should be looked upon as the effect of the bestowal of value and that it is the bestowal of value upon the beloved
that is the essence of love rather than the attitude of concern 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." But to bestow value on someone, I must respond appropriately to him as valuable. To know what is appropriate, I must have some sense of what his well-being is and of what may positively or negatively affect such well-being, knowing and appraising in various ways what his strengths and deficiencies are. So "bestowal of value upon the beloved" presupposes a kind of appraisal as a way of “really seeing” the beloved and attending to him. But to Singer, it is the bestowal that is primary for understanding what love consists in: the appraisal is needed only so that one may be committed to one's beloved. 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).  Insofar as the account is fundamentally abestowal account, Singer claims that love cannot be justified and that webestow the relevant kind of value “gratuitously.” To Helm, this suggests that love is blind and that it does not matter what our belovedis like. This seems " patently false." To Helm, it is only because we appraise another as having certain virtues and vices that we come to bestow value on him but the “because” here, since it cannot justify the bestowal, is "at best a kind of contingent causal explanation."So to Helm,  Singer's account of the selectivity of love is much the same as Velleman's, and it is liable to the same criticism i.e.: it cannot explain how 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 because 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 being already there in the object as the grounds of that “bestowal.”

Helm thinks that Singer must explain precisely what a bestowal is e.g what is the value that I create in a bestowal, and how can my bestowal create it? To him, a crude  answer might be that the value is something projected onto the world through my
pro-attitudes, like desire. Yet such a view is inadequate because 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. He thinks that 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? Yet Helm thinks that 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 missing may well be emotions.