Abstract
Much recent discussion of love concerns ‘the reasons for love’: whether we love for reasons and, if so, what sorts of things those reasons are. This chapter seeks to call into question some of the assumptions that have shaped this debate, in particular the assumption that love might be ‘responsive’ to reasons in something like the way that actions, beliefs, intentions, and ordinary emotions are. I begin by drawing out some tensions in the existing literature on reasons for love, suggesting that these arise in part because different interests expressed in the language of ‘reasons’—the interests of explanation, justification, and interpersonal understanding—pull us toward different kinds of accounts of reasons for love. This seems to count in favor of treating these interests separately, with different conceptions of the reasons that answer to them. This suggestion, as I explain, runs up against a certain conception of ‘responsiveness to reasons’, which I argue is implicitly assumed in many discussions of reasons for love. However, I argue that we should be skeptical about the application of this conception to love in light of the ontological differences between love and paradigm ‘reasons-responsive’ phenomena, potentially making room for the suggested methodological separation.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
If love is an emotion, the point here is that things are less clear in the case of love than they are in the case of certain other emotions. But perhaps love is not itself an emotion, even though it is intimately connected with emotions. Either way, I will argue later that there are significant differences between love and emotions like anger and relief, such that love deserves separate treatment.
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One way to explicate this idea, for example, is to say that reasons for action relate to the good at which the action aims: the good in question gives the action its point (e.g. Raz 1999). A different approach appeals to the desires of the agent: the point of acting is to satisfy one’s desires (e.g. Schroeder 2007). Perhaps the right account combines both ideas somehow (e.g. Chang 2011), or appeals to something else such as norms or rules or rationality (e.g. Korsgaard 1996). Since our present concern is with love, not action, there is thankfully no need for us to take a stand on this difficult issue here.
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Beliefs can sometimes be motivated. People do sometimes engage in motivated reasoning or wishful thinking, believing things that they want to believe because they want to believe them. We tend to think of such beliefs as irrational, and it seems that believing in this way involves some degree of self-deception, with the believer convincing themselves that they actually have good grounds for believing as they do. While this phenomenon may be more common than we would like to admit, it probably shouldn’t be our paradigm of believing for a reason.
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Abramson and Leite (2018) express skepticism about the analysis of reasons-responsiveness as necessarily running via the agent’s judgments or beliefs. Nonetheless, they maintain that love is reasons-responsive and seem clearly to think that an account of love’s justifying reasons needs to make sense of its psychology in something like the way outlined in the previous paragraph.
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Contrast, with Kolodny’s account, the resolutely historical view of love in, for instance, Grau (2010).
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Compare Fogal ’s (2018) ‘deflationary pluralism’ about motivating reasons for action.
- 10.
I started work on this chapter while a postdoc at the University of Fribourg, working on the Swiss National Science Foundation-funded project Modes and Contents and as a member of the Thumos research group in the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva. I would especially like to thank Fabrice Teroni for encouraging me to think about some of the issues in this chapter, as well as for encouraging me so much in general. An early version was presented at the Slippery Slope Normativity Summit in Lillehammer, and I would also like to thank the audience at that conference for a number of insightful questions and suggestions. Finally, I am grateful to Simon Cushing for very helpful written comments that greatly improved the quality of the chapter.
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Phillips, E. (2021). Sentimental Reasons. In: Cushing, S. (eds) New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72324-8_9
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