DESCRIPCIÓN DEL LUGAR DEL EXPERIMENTO

The proposed model of love as a way of valuing construes the relationship between the motivations and emotions characteristic of love, on the one hand, and the appreciation of the person’s value, on the other hand, in a way different from both Frankfurt’s and Velleman’s. On this model, when you love a person, your desire for her well-being is not free-floating, à la Frankfurt; neither is it merely caused, or “unleashed,” as Velleman puts it, by the appreciation of the person’s value. Rather, your desire for her well-being, as well as your emotional reactions – your happiness when the beloved is doing well, your sadness when she is unhappy, etc. – are grounded in, and seen by the agent to be grounded in, the value of the beloved.78 I believe that this feature explains better an important aspect of the value characteristic of love.

I do not mean to imply, however, that anything that may support a good relationship is a good reason for love. The fact that she lives in California and you like the climate there, or that she has a great income and financial security tends to be a good premise for a good relationship, doesn’t make these reasons for love. Here is why. X cannot be a justifying reason for Y unless it is also a warranting reason for Y. It cannot be a good thing to respond to X with Y if it’s not intelligible to respond to X with Y. And, for reasons I discuss below, love is not intelligible as a response to a person’s location.

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One worry about this account is that it seems to imply that only the existence and flourishing of persons who have qualities like wit, intelligence, kindness, etc. is worthwhile, whereas we believe, of course, that any person’s flourishing is worthwhile, simply by virtue of her being a person. But we need not have this worry. Loving someone involves seeing her in a certain value-laden way; it involves seeing her as warranting one’s personal concern and interest and a host of emotional reactions. This is not incompatible with seeing all people’s existence and flourishing as valuable. The kinds of value perceived in the two cases are different. The value all people have as people warrants respect. As persons, all people are equally valuable. But people are not valuable only as people. For example, they are also valuable as athletes, teachers, members of the homo sapiens species, etc. Love is, I will claim, a response to a certain kind of value that a person has that goes beyond her value qua person. That response involves seeing that kind of value in a particular person as warranting and justifying (though not requiring) the motivations and emotions characteristic of love. It will become clear later in the chapter that that kind of value, unlike the value a person has by virtue of being a person, does not entail an obligation to appreciate it. An analogy with the value of art might be in order here.

Many psychologists and some philosophers point out that one of the most important contributions love relationships make to a person’s life is promoting and maintaining one’s sense of self-worth. Our self-image and sense of self-worth are shaped to a large degree by the way others see us and treat us. If we understand love as a way of valuing a person, it is not difficult to see how love contributes to one’s sense of self-worth. When you love someone, you see her as having a kind of value that warrants concern for her well-being, commiseration, happiness at her achievements, treating her as irreplaceable, etc. Since, as social psychologists point out, we tend to see ourselves and treat ourselves the way others (especially close others) see and treat us, your seeing your beloved as worthy of care, understanding, striving for happiness, will support his seeing himself as worthy of the same.

This explains several things. It explains why we see only certain qualities, and not others, as good reasons for love. We do not want to be loved for our blond hair because we do not believe that that is the kind of quality that makes our existence and flourishing a good thing, desirable for its own sake. Implying that that is what makes us worthwhile can be seen as an insult, as a way of saying that there is nothing more valuable to us. We want

If a painting is an exquisite work of art, its value as a work of art might entail an obligation to preserve it; but it does not entail an obligation to be ecstatic every time I see it. If I am color-blind, or simply have no taste for that kind of art, there is nothing wrong with my spending my time listening to music instead. But if I am capable of appreciating and becoming ecstatic at its particular value – the value it has not simply by being a work of art, but in virtue of its particular artistic qualities – that value warrants and justifies my ecstatic response. Similarly, the value a person has qua person entails an obligation to respect her, but not to love her. The value she has by virtue of certain qualities does not require, but warrants and justifies a love response, where that occurs.

to be loved for “who we really are” – that is, for those qualities that we ourselves believe (or are open to believing) make us individuals whose flourishing is worthwhile.

Love’s value in supporting one’s sense of self-worth also explains why the irreplaceability of the beloved, and the specific role her identity plays in grounding love, are crucial features of love. If someone’s concern for you were not based on an appreciation of who you are, it would not convey the message that you are worthy of such concern, and therefore make no difference to the way you see and treat yourself.

If love didn’t involve seeing the beloved as irreplaceable, then it wouldn’t convey the message that you are worthy of concern. Here is how I think irreplaceability comes into play. In order to be able to function as a practical agent, you need to be able to see the fact that something is your desire, aim, intention, project, dream etc. as a prima facie reason to act on it.79 It would be useless for an agent to form a desire, intention, or the like, if she never took these attitudes to give her reasons for acting on them. Imagine what it would be like to form an intention to go for a walk at 7 pm, but then, at 7 pm, to think of the fact that you have the intention to take a walk as giving you no reason whatsoever for taking the walk. The number of actions that are worth performing at any point in time is large; and if one did not regard the fact that one has a preference, desire, or plan to perform one of those actions rather than the others, one would have no way of choosing between all possible equally good actions, and would be paralyzed to inactivity.

In order for one to function effectively as an agent, it is necessary, then, to be able to see oneself as the source of reasons for action in this way. Love can support this kind of

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John Broome argues, in “Are intentions reasons”?, that intentions do not constitute reasons for action; rather, they provide a “rational justification” for action that is different from reasons. For my purposes here, I will ignore the possible distinction between reasons and rational justifications. The argument I make above can be made by using the concept of rational justification instead of reasons throughout.

sense of self-worth only if the beloved is seen as irreplaceable. If I desire your well-being in a way that does not differentiate between you and other (possible or actual) people with the same qualities, my desire for your well being does not say that you, as an individual, are worthy of being cared for, it does not say that the fact that something contributes to your well-being (as opposed to “to a person’s well being,” or “to the well being of a person with qualities x, y z”) is a reason to pursue it, that the fact that something would fulfill your desires or dreams is a reason to go for it.

Seeing the beloved as irreplaceable is also a condition of the characteristic dynamic of relationships based on love, and one of the aspects of love that enable it to bring meaningfulness into the lover’s life.

Chapter 3: How valuing gives rise to special “oughts”