Abstract
This essay defends subjectivism about reasons of love. These are the normative reasons we have to treat those we love especially well, such as the reasons we have to treat our close friends or life partners better than strangers. Subjectivism about reasons of love is the view that every reason of love a person has is correctly explained by her desires. I formulate a version of subjectivism about reasons of love and defend it against three objections that have been made to this kind of view. Firstly, it has been argued that the phenomenology of our focus when we have reasons of love does not fit with subjectivism about those reasons. Secondly, it has been argued that the phenomenology of our motivations when we have reasons of love does not fit with subjectivism about those reasons. Thirdly, it has been argued that subjectivism about reasons of love has deeply counterintuitive implications about what our reasons of love are. I argue that none of these objections succeeds.
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Notes
Note that although reasons about love are a kind of reasons for partiality we can have reasons for partiality that are not reasons of love; I might have reason to be partial to colleagues, to particular foods, to relatives I don’t love, or to a particular football team, for example (Keller 2013, Lord 2016).
Some philosophers have taken Bernard Williams, Richard Rorty, and Susan Wolf to argue for subjectivism specifically about reasons of love in the form of the Projects View. I argue those philosophers are mistaken in those attributions, in section 2.3. Simon Keller also gives Frankfurt as an example of someone who is a subjectivist specifically about reasons of love (Keller 2017: 5). While it is safe to assume that Frankfurt would subscribe to subjectivism about reasons of love, like anyone who is a subjectivist about all reasons, Frankfurt does not state or clearly imply, when speaking of reasons of love, that reasons of love are explained by desires. He states that loving grounds some reasons (Frankfurt 2004: 37), and that loving requires having certain desires (Frankfurt 2004: 42), but it doesn’t follow that those reasons are explained by those desires; it’s possible those reasons are explained by the inherent value of an object, to which Frankfurt says love is sometimes a response (Frankfurt 2004: 38, 40).
Of course, it could be that subjectivism about reasons of love is true but subjectivism about other kinds of reasons is false; I do not aim to defend subjectivism about all reasons in this essay.
Schroeder defends the Humean theory of reasons, not subjectivism; like many philosophers, I take the Humean theory of reasons to be a form of subjectivism.
In the quoted passage Sobel speaks not of “what one desires” but of “what one loves and cares about,” but Sobel accepts “desire” as an umbrella term for the kinds of attitudes he has in mind (Sobel 2016a: 3), and that term is clearer in the context of this essay.
Not all these philosophers are subjectivists; rather, the restrictions they place on desires are examples of the kind of restrictions subjectivists favour.
For views of love that hold that it requires the desire for union with the beloved, see Delaney (1996), Greenspan (1988: 55), and Lyons (1980: 64); for views of love that hold that it requires the desire for the beloved’s wellbeing, see Frankfurt (1998, 2004), Kant (1797/1996: II,1.1 25–30), Rawls (1971: 190), Rorty (2016), Soble (1990, 1997: 65), and White (2001); and for views of love that hold that it requires both those desires, see Nozick (1989), Sidgwick (1874/1981: 244), Stump (2006), and Taylor (1975).
Eros is a kind of passionate desire, typically sexual, and agape is a kind of love impartial toward the persons who are its objects and not responsive to their qualities. Philia is a personal, partial love responsive to the qualities of its objects, and includes such things as friendships and committed romantic partnerships. The view of love I work with, however, excludes the kind of philia Aristotle discusses in which someone is valued as a friend only for their usefulness to oneself (Aristotle (2009): Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII). I exclude such purely utility-based attitudes from the attitudes of friendship for two reasons. Firstly, this is not the kind of attitude that is of concern in the objections to subjectivism about reasons of love I respond to which discuss friendship: in those objections friendship is not a purely utility-based relationship but one which requires a concern for the other’s wellbeing for her sake. Secondly, I believe the view that having the attitudes of friendship toward someone can consist of valuing them only for their usefulness to oneself is now rare enough to leave aside for the purposes of this essay. (For example, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Friendship” takes it as uncontroversial that being a friend to someone requires a concern for that person for her own sake [Helm, 2017].)
Williams and some other philosophers are taken as arguing for the Projects View by Keller and Errol Lord (Keller 2013, Lord 2016), but I believe this is a mistake. Keller and Lord attribute the view to Williams’s “Persons, Character, and Morality” (1981b), which argues that impartialist moral theories ask too much as they demand that we act against our ground projects. Williams writes that “a commitment or involvement with a particular other person might be one of the kinds” of ground project (Williams 1981b: 16), but does not claim that all such commitments are ground projects, or that our reasons of love are always or even generally correctly explained by ground projects. The view has also been attributed to Richard Rorty (1997), Susan Wolf (1992) and Williams’s “Internal and External Reasons” (1981a) (in Keller [2013: 12] and Lord [2016: 571]), but neither Rorty nor Wolf says that our reasons of love are correctly explained by our personal projects, and Williams does not claim our ground projects are the only, or even most common, aspect of our subjective motivational set from which we can correctly deliberate to our reasons of love.
Keller also objects to the Projects View on the grounds that there can be cases in which someone has ground projects involving relationships but has no reasons of partiality towards the other people in those relationships (Keller 2013: 40–41). But as Keller and Lord define it, the Projects View does not hold that all ground projects involving relationships give reasons, just that all reasons of love are correctly explained by ground projects.
Lord uses the term “Focus Problem” with reference to this objection to the Projects View (Lord 2016: 573); I adopt it to describe Keller’s similar objection to subjectivism about reasons of love.
Philip Pettit and Michael Smith also argue for the “strict background view of desire,” according to which a desire can figure in a person’s reasons without her being aware of it, in their (1990).
Neil Sinhababu notes this feature of desire, which he calls its Attentional Aspect (Sinhababu 2017: 33).
Williams makes this clear about ground projects: “Ground projects do not have to be selfish, in the sense that they are just concerned with things for the agent. Nor do they have to be self-centred, in the sense that the creative projects of a Romantic artist could be considered self-centred (where it has to be him, but not for him)” (Williams 1981b: 13).
Keller might be arguing that when our motivations are desires, we are not moved by love, because when we are moved by the desires he lists in his example we are not moved by love. But it is no objection to SRL that there exist some desires such that, if we are motivated by them, we are not motivated by love; SRL does not imply that all desires entail reasons of love.
Rather than talking of “subjectivism about the reasons of love,” Jeske talks of “the Humean account of reasons of intimacy.” Humeanism about reasons of intimacy is the view that the reasons we have to give preferential treatment to our intimates are “subjective agent-relative reasons” which are “grounded by our desires” (Jeske 2008: 29–30). Humeanism about reasons of intimacy is thus the same thing as subjectivism about reasons of intimacy. In her argument against subjectivism about reasons of intimacy, Jeske uses just one kind of intimate relationship, friendship. As intimate friendship, as Jeske describes it, is a relationship of love, I take it she is arguing against subjectivism about reasons of love with this example, though her ultimate aim is to also object to subjectivism about reasons of intimacy with regard to intimates we don’t love.
For ways in which we can rightly attribute blame to a person for acting on her reasons, see (Williams 1995).
For perhaps the most extensive argument against the intuition, see Vogler (2002).
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Acknowledgments
For helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper I’m grateful to Hannah Simpson, Maria Altepeter, Richard Joyce, anonymous referees for Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, and especially Simon Keller. I’m also grateful to Simon for sparking my interest in this topic.
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Drake, N. Love, Reasons, and Desire. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 23, 591–605 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-020-10084-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-020-10084-1