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In this chapter I have provided important background material necessary to understand McTaggart’s account of the nature of love. We have looked at the two theories of emotion out of which McTaggart was working when he described love in the early stages of his career and the later stages of his career. Understanding what exactly McTaggart means by “emotion” at each stage will be important for understanding some of the particular features of love that he identifies in each stage. While his overall theory of love does not change in its core aspects, the shift in theories of emotion allows him to emphasize different aspects of experience of love in each stage of his career. We also looked at McTaggart’s theory of the person in order to understand how it is that a person’s conscious states and a person’s properties are each related to and distinguished from the person itself. Understanding the underlying metaphysical theory of the person will help make sense of McTaggart’s central claim that that object of love is a person and not a person’s qualities, (though a person’s qualities are the cause of love). Finally, we looked at the general approach that McTaggart uses to distinguish and describe different kinds of conscious states according to their necessary and unique causes and intentional object. In the next chapter I will summarize in detail how McTaggart describes love in terms of its necessary and unique causes and object and I will summarize and assess his arguments supporting these claims.

CHAPTER 2

2

McTaggart’s Philosophy of Love

This chapter summarizes, explains, and assesses McTaggart’s philosophical account of love. McTaggart describes love, and differentiates it from all other kinds of conscious states and emotions by identifying certain causes and objects as essential for love (employing the method outlined at the end of Chapter 1). The chapter proceeds in two parts. The first considers what causes loving emotions. McTaggart seeks to isolate which causes, if any, are necessary and sufficient for love and then explain the role of any other (proximate) causes that might be involved in bringing about love. The second part looks at McTaggart’s argument for the claim that the object of love is a person and never a person’s qualities. McTaggart’s argument is very compressed and I will reconstruct and explain the various steps required for it to succeed. My analysis will also provide reasons for thinking that McTaggart held a particular view about the nature of the value of love: that it is a higher- order intrinsic good. This has important implications for the following chapters on McTaggart’ theory of value, his moral philosophy, and the role that love is assigned within moral philosophy.

Before beginning, however, it is important to clarify the kind of love that McTaggart is investigating. There are clearly many senses in which we can be said to love things, and McTaggart was aware of all of these. We often speak of loving inanimate objects, animals, persons, abstract entities such as one’s nation/state or one’s “alma mater,” and even what is represented by abstract concepts such as ‘justice’ or ‘truth.’ McTaggart’s interest is solely in describing the love that we have for persons.1 _{Furthermore, it is clear that he is describing}

love between fully developed and fully functional persons. It is not clear how his account would apply to love for beings whose status as persons is ambiguous (e.g., a young child), compromised (e.g., those suffering from certain psychological diseases), or controversial

1 _{McTaggart, NE2, §459: “But how is love to be distinguished from other sorts of liking? I propose to confine} the word, in the first place, to a liking which is felt towards persons. Here, perhaps, it is more doubtful if common usage supports the restriction. It is not so clear that we are speaking metaphorically when we say that a man loves the Alps, as when we say that he loves justice. Still less is it clear that we are speaking metaphorically when we say that he loves his school or his country. But it is important to have a separate name for the liking which is felt only towards persons, and there is, I think, no question that, however far the common use of the word may extend, the central and typical use of it is for an emotion felt towards persons. And thus, in using it exclusively for that emotion, we shall not depart much from the common use, if we depart at all.” (Underlining is mine.)

(e.g., some non-human animals). For instance, while there is clearly a legitimate and important sense in which we can love young children, it is not clear that children are the kinds of beings that can love in the way described below. While they certainly (at some point in their development) have many of the core capacities associated with personhood (e.g., the ability to self-consciously reflect on their own thoughts, actions, and character in a way that allows them to contrast and compare these with the world outside of them; the ability to set goals and make plans to carry them out; etc.) they clearly – as children – do not have the capability to exercise such capacities at will, or in a constant way, or in a reliably successful way. Being a child just means being the kind of entity who is developing such capacities and who is (ideally) working towards a sufficient degree of aptitude and proficiency that is typical of adulthood.2 _{McTaggart does not discuss the love of children in his work. He does discuss}

issues surrounding child development when he discusses the extent to which we ought to allow children the freedom to make mistakes and how we ought to discipline children, but there is no explicit mention about love in these discussions.3 _{There is also the issue about}

whether the love a parent feels for their child is just one kind of love throughout the whole process of development (in utero, infancy, early childhood, late childhood, and adolescence) or whether one moves between one distinct kind of love to another at various points in the process. Since the person-status of children is very complicated (and would widely be recognized as a “grey area” in regards to ethical issues) and since McTaggart’s account of love was clearly only meant to apply to love for adult persons, I will not be addressing issues related to loving children in what follows. There are surely some interesting questions to be raised in this regards (and in regards to the other experiences of love for non-adult persons), but it would take us far off task to address them in a meaningful way.