The rationalist lover accepts that whom she ought to love is whom she has most reason to love. She also accepts that the qualities of a person are reasons to love them. This seems to suggest that if the rationalist lover encounters someone with better qualities than her beloved, then she is rationally required to trade up. In this paper, I argue that this need not be the case and the rationalist lover can have just about as normal if not a better romantic life than anyone could hope for. This is because we often do possess most reason to love our beloveds. To see why this is so, we have to think more carefully about (i) how we come to possess reasons for love and (ii) the higher-order reasons that govern whether we should seek or refrain from possessing said reasons. Reflection on these issues leads to what I call the Possession-Commitment Account of Love’s Reasons. I use this account to address additional worries for love rationalism and highlight how being rational about love can potentially get us out of romantic messes. I conclude that if being a rationalist about love is plausible after all, then we have reason to hope that being rational about other areas of our practical lives is plausible as well.
At first glance, if you are a committed rationalist lover, your romantic life will be a mess. You will feel constant pressure to trade up whenever you meet or are even aware of someone with seemingly better qualities than your present beloved. Intuitively, we not only do not, but we should not live our romantic lives this way. While people’s qualities provide us with reasons to love them, most of us think that it is perfectly rational for us to refuse to trade up whenever we meet someone with seemingly better qualities. It also seems perfectly rational for us to remain in love with our beloveds even if they end up losing some of their loveable qualities.
In this paper, I will argue that despite appearances, a rationalist lover can have about as normal (if not a better) romantic life than anybody else can hope to have. Granted, the rationalist I am envisioning will have to accept that they ought to trade up in some cases. Even so, we will see that trading up might be the plausible thing to do in those cases after all.
Before proceeding, it is important to state the scope of the present discussion and how it aims to bring a novel contribution to the vast and expanding literature on love. The present discussion is not an attempt to determine whether love rationalism or non/anti-rationalism is the better position.
Here is the roadmap for the paper. In
To get clear on what the problem for the rationalist lover is supposed to be, consider the following case:
Upon discovering Nayla as a romantic possibility, most of us do not think Amal is now rationally required to trade up and love Nayla. Yet, Amal, the ever-rationalist lover, seems committed to trading up if she accepts three independently plausible and fairly popular theses about: (i) how the reasons we have determine what we ought to do or what emotions we ought to have, (ii) how we come to have reasons, and (iii) what counts as a reason for love.
First, consider:
To be clear,
This leads us to our second thesis:
What conditions must be met for me to possess some fact as a reason to do something (i.e., a fact that can play a role in determining what I ought to do or what attitudes I ought to have)? One candidate common in the literature (and one that we will reconsider shortly) is simply knowing said fact. Continuing with
This leads us to our third and final thesis. If knowledge of some fact is sufficient for possessing it as a reason, then what would we have to know about a person that would lead us to possess reasons to love them? Consider the following:
Though some philosophers are suspicious that there are reasons for love precisely because they are worried about problems for love rationalism, many philosophers also think that the positive qualities of a person are reasons to love them because they are facts that count in favor of doing so. For example, a person’s patience, open-mindedness, generosity, beauty, humor, or gruffness can all be reasons to love them.
Each thesis is independently plausible. But when taken together, they place rational pressure on Amal to trade up. If Amal, through Super Tinder, knows that Nayla has better qualities than George, barring other considerations, she possesses weightier reason to love Nayla over George. On pain of violating
While a common strategy for resolving the Trading Up Problem is to make love’s reasons exempt from the weighing explanations implicit in
Here is a preview. In defending the
Before presenting the
Examples include dispositions to favor the beloved’s interests in practical deliberation, to admire and enjoy their intellectual, moral, and physical qualities, and to reason in ways that would present their qualities in a positive light both to yourself and to others.
While there are additional complexities, the above characterization is both ecumenical and substantive enough for us to raise the Trading Up Problem for any reasons-based account of love that finds
Instead of making romantic love exempt from
Here are the three theses that comprise the
To motivate
Though plausible in simple cases, rationalist lovers should note that
The fact that the fish has salmonella is (in most cases) a decisive reason not to order it. If Lois did possess the reason, then it would be irrational for her to order it. But intuitively (though unfortunately), it is not irrational for her to do so. This is because she fails to possess the reason. What Lois is missing is a certain competence or know-how stated by
Not only must Lois know the salmonella fact in order to possess it, she must also know how to use it as the genuine normative reason it is to avoid ordering the salmon. Lacking this know-how, Lois fails to possess the reason.
If possessing a reason requires knowing how to use it as the genuine normative reason it is, then what other conditions must be met in order for us to possess this know-how with respect to any given reason? For our purpose, we will focus on the upshots of two sufficient conditions.
First, there are a number of cases in which gaining the relevant know-how just involves gaining additional propositional knowledge. In the case of
Note that correctly judging that the behavioral and affective dispositions of a person are genuinely moral qualities (and thereby reasons to love them) can take extensive interaction to gain propositional knowledge about that person. For example, we may catch a good person with many moral qualities yelling at an unassuming waiter on a bad day. On the flip side, someone who seems morally upright can turn out to be a brown-nosing moral fraud. To discern whether a potential lover actually has loveable moral qualities in the first place, we will typically need to examine how they act in a variety of contexts to see whether their behaviors exhibit broad patterns of virtue or vice. If so, then possessing a person’s character-based qualities as reasons to love them may require us to pay attention to them for a significant amount of time to discern what they are actually like.
Similar things can be said for non-moral character qualities such as humor.
Second, there are other cases in which the know-how that is required to possess a fact as a reason for an action or attitude cannot be accounted for in terms of additional propositional knowledge attainable through third-personal means such as testimony.
The rationalist lover can point out that possessing love’s reasons similarly requires first-personal experience. Note that even if we can love someone without meeting with them in person (e.g., getting tricked into loving a bot or a deceptive online avatar), most would accept that we cannot love solely on the basis of third-personal testimony or definite description of a person.
If what I have said about possessing love’s reasons is correct, a key upshot is that we have more control over whether we possess love’s reasons than critics of love rationalism implicitly assume. Encountering someone prettier or nicer than your beloved does not entail that you thereby possess decisive reason to trade up. To satisfy the possession conditions for certain qualities, we may have to have prolonged interactions with them—interactions we may possess only weak reasons to have.
The
But suppose our rationalist lover is a strict adherent of the
For example, the value of your relationship with your beloved, the value of romantically loving them, and the value of your shared projects and children can provide higher-order reasons to make sure that your first-order quality-based reasons continue to decisively favor loving your beloved rather than others. In short, these facts provide us with reasons to fix our attention on our beloveds—to spend time with them, to interpret their actions and attitudes charitably, and to forgo certain levels of intimacy with others.
The most important source of these reasons and a crucial component of the
Actual romantic practice confirms this diagnosis. If what it takes to possess the qualities of a person as reasons for love requires first-personal experience or at least significant attention to discern what someone is actually like, then it is no wonder that in committing to our beloveds, we promise to lavish that time and prolonged attention on them and refrain from doing the same with other potential partners. This is not to say that we should never spend time with others. Marriage vows or other commitments we make to someone do not justify policies like refraining to eat meals with people who are not our beloveds. Instead, they justify the actual romantic practice of fostering prolonged and intimate first-personal experiences with our beloveds (e.g., private candle-lit dinners) while refraining from doing so with others.
Having motivated the
Romantic love tends to be rationally stable. When we love someone, we aren’t required to love someone else when we notice that they have better qualities (trade up), stop loving our beloved when they lose their qualities (inconstancy), love everyone who has similar qualities as our beloved (promiscuity). Nor are others required to love our beloveds (universality). The
Though the rationalist lover cannot rule out the possibility that she ought to trade up in some cases, such cases would be rare. There are two reasons for this. First, we noted that possessing the qualities of a person as reasons to love them is more complicated than just knowing that they have those qualities. Tinder, even Super Tinder profiles, will not suffice for fully possessing a variety of personal qualities as reasons for love.
Second, recall
We can address the inconstancy problem in two ways. First, even if a person loses their qualities,
As for the promiscuity problem, assuming the bar for possessing love’s reasons can be quite high, whether you possess reasons to love multiple people will depend on what reasons you possess. If a lover spreads her attention across multiple people, and she has the resources to love multiple people, then perhaps she is rationally required to be promiscuous. For most of us, this will not apply if there are non-quality-based reasons that decisively favor loving our beloved or we simply do not have the kind of cognitive, affective, and physical resources of the promiscuous lover. A neat feature of the present account is that it allows for some individual variation. It leaves room for ethical polyamory (which will depend on the dispositions of individual lovers and the reasons they happen to possess) rather than taking its falsehood as a data point to be explained.
As for the universality problem, love rationalism supplemented with the
You might worry that for the rationalist lover, love will end up being rationally required in cases where you possess most reason to love someone. However, some think love can never be rationally required in this way. Though I believe this claim is false, the rationalist lover can nonetheless point out that she is seldom compelled by her possessed reasons to love a particular person.
Let us illustrate the point with a question. Does the rationalist lover always have to love the first person she meets with decent qualities? No. Recall our NYU freshman. Suppose she meets a decent person and begins to possess their qualities as reasons to love them. She is not thereby required to romantically love them supposing she has not met anyone else. This is because she has good reason to explore other options given her environment. Neither the
I suspect that our resistance to the idea that love can be rationally required is that love always feels optional even if a potential beloved has great qualities. To make the optionality intuition stronger, let us imagine that the hypothetical lover who meets such a potential beloved is an unattached single person. Even so, we can account for the intuition of optionality in several ways without denying that love can be rationally required.
First, we already noted that deciding whom to love is a temporally extended process and it can be rational to wait. Second, recall that recognizing that someone has great qualities does not mean that you thereby possess said qualities as reasons. Just meeting someone with great qualities does not entail that you must attend to them carefully. Third, though we can recognize that someone has great qualities, they need not be reasons
Furthermore, biting the bullet is not all that counterintuitive. If you (i) possess the qualities of a person as reasons to love them, (ii) correctly judge that you now have most reason to love them, and (iii) correctly judge that there aren’t other people that you’ll encounter with better qualities, then you may be rationally required to love such a person. I suspect that such cases are rather rare, but if these conditions are met, it is plausible that you are rationally required to love such a person. Failing to do so would be imprudent! Note also that even if it is odd to think that love can be rationally required, there are degrees of irrationality. Assuming the degree of irrationality is minimal, blame for imprudent management of one’s romantic love may be comparably minimal when considering the appropriate blame for failing to execute a serious moral obligation instead.
Finally, claiming that love is always optional or voluntary ignores the fact that sometimes we do just
The rationalist lover, as I have stipulated, will have to accept that when we possess most reason to love someone else, we are required to do so. I have argued that this is not as counterintuitive as we may have initially thought. I also want to point out that the rationalist lover also has something plausible to say in cases where love has gone horribly wrong.
Thus far, we have focused on cases in which a lover may already love someone that is decent but encounters someone with better qualities. However, we have not considered cases in which a lover is currently with someone who is horrible. Granted, our beloveds can come to lose their loveable qualities. But there are plenty of unfortunate cases in which beloveds not only lose their loveable qualities but also become abusive or lead us into harmful co-dependency. In the worst-case scenario, we may also have no reason to believe that our beloveds can change.
Though such cases require careful treatment that I cannot give here, the rationalist lover can make some plausible preliminary recommendations. First, even if a lover is clearly aware of the negative qualities of her beloved, she might not be able to thereby stop loving her beloved at will.
If the
I have drawn inspiration for the
Formulated in terms of understanding, then, my claim is that the nature of the goodness of particular individuals is such that one can understand it (in a way that goes beyond what one knows) when one is suitably placed, and that this requires a first-personal connection with the relevant individuals that relationships can provide. When one has achieved the relevant sort of understanding with respect to the goodness of a particular individual, then one’s normative situation is such that loving them is fitting. Loving them would be fitting, furthermore, even if one knows that another individual has similar qualities and is thereby equally lovable.
I agree with Naar that first-personal experience plays a crucial role in accounting for the rationality of love and that something like understanding as opposed to mere knowledge of a person’s goodness is what makes it fitting or rational to love that person. The
On the present proposal, first-personal experience of a person’s qualities (what constitutes understanding for Naar) is often what allows us to possess those qualities as reasons for love. Since what attitudes we ought to have is a function of the reasons we possess and first-personal experience is what explains how we possess the qualities of our beloveds rather than the qualities of strangers as reasons for love, the presence or absence of first-personal experience helps determine when we ought to love someone. This is how first-personal experience (or understanding) of a person can, as Naar rightly notes, make it so that one’s situation is such that loving them is fitting.
An additional difference is my emphasis on commitment and the active role a lover plays in maintaining her love for her beloved. By continuing to attend to our beloved’s qualities while refraining from lavishing the same attention on others, we take active steps to possess decisive reason to love our beloveds. Since Naar primarily focuses on the role first-personal experience plays in justifying love, he leaves the rationalist lover with fewer resources to address the Trading Up Problem.
My emphasis on the lover’s attention to her beloved’s qualities is inspired by Jollimore. On his Vision View, loving someone is a matter of freely attending to their qualities as opposed to others. Jollimore is right that a key feature of romantic love involves a generous and continued attention to the beloved.
First, the Vision View appeals to non-requiring reasons (i.e., reasons that favor actions and attitudes without playing any role in generating deontic or rational verdicts), while the
Second, appealing to reasons possession provides a simple way of understanding the normative significance of attention. On the Vision View, when we attend to the qualities of our beloved as opposed to others, the qualities of others become silenced as reasons for love even though we recognize them as genuine qualities.
Third, unlike the Vision View, the
Finally,
Suppose you rejected this claim in favor of objectivism about ought judgments. Perhaps what it is
First, most objectivists would want to divorce ought judgments from praise and blame judgments. If so, then even if it is true in some objective sense that you ought to trade up (suppose that there is someone so great that their qualities outweigh
In this paper, I’ve argued that the rationalist lover (i.e., someone who accepts the plausible claims that (i) we ought to do (feel) what we have most reason to do (feel) and (ii) the qualities of a beloved are weighty reasons to romantically love them) can lead a normal romantic life. By proposing the
Let us close with three reasons for why we should care about this result. First, the rationalist lover is not some bizarre philosophical figure. She is just a practically rational agent that makes no exceptions in the case of love and has a plausible view about what counts as a reason for love. Good news for the rationalist lover means we have reason to believe that being practically rational will not drastically conflict with how we lead our romantic lives either. Second, the present proposal is both systematic and philosophically conservative. We have made no use of any special kinds of reasons (e.g., second-personal, haecceistic, non-insistent reasons, etc.) and we relied on an ecumenical account of romantic love. The only tools we needed were an account of reasons possession that is well-motivated and the uncontroversial claim that we sometimes have higher-order reasons to initiate or refrain from searching for more reasons. Lastly, note the solution presented here may be extended to other areas of our practical lives. Just as we can resist the rational pressure to trade up in our romantic lives, we may appeal to similar considerations to resist the rational pressure to trade up in regard to other important personal projects such as our vocations and plans. In sum, life is messy but at least we can be rational about it.
I would like to thank Meghan Sullivan, Kieran Setiya, Laura Callahan, and anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback on multiple versions of this paper. I would also like to thank members of the Chapel Hill Normativity Conference 2018, the Notre Dame Dissertation Reading Group 2019, and the students in my Fall 2019 course on love and friendship at Notre Dame. Finally, thanks to all those whose love has kept me going in this profession. In particular, thanks to my parents whose love for one another and for me has been an inspiration for this project.
Though I focus on romantic love in the paper, similar arguments can apply for other forms of love that tend to be exclusive and subject to our choice (e.g., friendship). The scope of this paper will not cover forms of love that are not exclusive or not subject to our choice (e.g., parental love, agape, etc.).
A commentator notes that there is disagreement on how the distinction should even be drawn (e.g., in terms of whether there are fittingness-based reasons for love, whether there are non-quality-based reasons for love, etc.). I remain neutral on these matters.
A reviewer has pointed out that there are multiple versions of the Trading Up Problem. For the purposes of this paper, we will focus on the version of the problem stated in the next section.
See
I am not claiming that all philosophers who think that there are reasons for love must accept
See
See
For examples of the quality view, see
See
One way of doing this that is common in the literature is to argue that love’s qualities are reasons that cannot generate deontic requirements. They are non-insistent, enticing, or merely justifying reasons. See
For discussion of love as an attitude responsive to qualities, see
I am inspired by
For detailed discussion see
While I sometimes speak of reasons for love in a way that suggests that loving is a type of action, I am not committed to the idea that love is an action. Given my characterization of romantic love as a set of dispositions to act and feel, so long as there are reasons to develop these dispositions, I take said reasons to be reasons for love. Note that other philosophers such as Jollimore and Howard treat the Trading Up Problem seriously even though they do not claim that love is an action. One potential worry is that love is an evaluative attitude but there are no reasons for attitudes. See
The formulation is from
This is defended in
To be precise, I do not take these conditions to be enabling conditions for qualities to be reasons for love. These are sufficient conditions for reasons possession.
I also suspect that reasons possession comes in degrees. It could be the case that we possess the qualities of many people as reasons to love them but only to a minimal degree. Furthermore, if degrees of possession are directly proportional to weight in deliberation (which is plausible at least with epistemic reasons), then most of these possessed reasons will not be weighty in our deliberation.
Though I deny that the existence of a relationship is a requisite enabler for possessing a person’s qualities as reasons for love, I do think it is the context in which we are most likely to possess such reasons. See
I owe the example to Laura Callahan.
See chapter 3 and 4 of
See
This paragraph develops points from
See
This is not to say that there are never decisive reasons to engage in these kinds of interactions (even if one is in a relationship). This detail will be important in discussing how my view differs from
Absent non-quality-based reasons based in relationships or commitments, it is difficult to come up with examples of reasons that
See
Granted, it could work the other way as well. Even if the person you love has great qualities, there might be other facts that count against continuing to love that person (e.g., you can’t get along with them, your relationship with them has little value and brings disappointment to loved ones, etc.).
Thanks to Sarah Stroud for pressing me on this point.
A commentator noted that if you are a rationalist lover who also adheres to a strict quality view, you are committed to something very strange. If your beloved died but was replaced by a qualitative duplicate, then you are committed to loving that duplicate too. I do not think the rationalist lover has to adhere to the strict quality view, but it is not obvious the rationalist lover should not love the clone either. If psychological continuity is the correct account of personal identity, then you are just committing yourself to loving the same person. If not, the death of your actual beloved may give you decisive reason not to interact with her clone. If both your beloved and her clone exists at the same time, whether you possess most reason to love both persons will depend on the balance of possessed reasons in favor of or against being polyamorous.
See
Admittedly, I am skeptical of “love at first sight” or “falling in love”. My intention here is to explain how a rationalist lover
Finally, note that the rationalist lover cannot be expected to propose a reflective decision procedure that would help a lover guarantee that her love is rational. Perhaps there are tests for structural rationality (i.e., that our mental states satisfy certain structural rationality constraints like means-ends coherence and non-contradiction), but there is no reflective decision procedure that would guarantee that we are generally substantively rational—much less for love specifically. Thus, I agree with the reviewer that if “love at first sight” or “falling in love” turns out to be rational, this may often depend on luck. I am no optimist. That said, a lover could skillfully place herself in a situation in which she is highly likely to meet people with great qualities or perhaps she is particularly good at discerning a person’s qualities. If such a lover ends up “falling in love” with someone who genuinely has great qualities, then the substantive rationality of her love can be attributed to her skill as an experienced lover rather than to luck.
A reviewer was worried that insofar as love is resistant to or not subject to voluntary control, it is unclear whether it can be rationally required. First, note that other forms of non-romantic love can be required even if not directly under our voluntary control. We may be required to continue loving a friend or our children even if we currently fail to do so. Second, note that other mental states can be rationally required even if they are not under our voluntary control. For example, belief may be rationally required in the face of compelling evidence even if we do not have voluntary control over our beliefs. This is not to say that such rational requirements hold regardless of our capacities.
See
Granted, there are important complications in these cases (e.g., a lover may unfortunately have a reason to stay with her abuser in order to protect their children or other dependents, the lover has made certain commitments to the beloved, etc.).
The passage is quoted from page 26 of the pdf downloaded from the online published version of
A historical precursor to both our views is arguably Augustine’s view on which love is the overall direction of the will towards a particular object. See
See Any line we draw around the moral will need to rule in the classic mandatory benefits to others, along with the intuitive duties to take minimal care of oneself, while somehow excluding the benefits of flossing one’s own teeth and doing nice favors for other people. This is not an easy line to draw; these benefits do not seem so intrinsically different (draft: 7).
Second,
Commitments such as marriage vows can also help us understand how we can love on the basis of qualities without making love conditional on them. Love is importantly quality based. As