Of Soulmates and Old Spouses: How to be a Romantic Kantian about the Ethics of Love

1.1. Love, The Very Idea

We must start with something about the nature of the attitude of love. This is mostly because it will be hard to fully evaluate proposals about its ethics without having some idea of what it’s like. It is also because disputes over this play a large role in Kantian discussions, most particularly between David Velleman and Kieran Setiya. As will be common in this paper, I will use their views to anchor the discussion.¹

Velleman’s (1999) main goal is to show that love is a “moral emotion.” The biggest obstacle to this thesis, to him, is the idea that love is essentially partial and morality is essentially impartial. He wants an account of love compatible with impartiality. He thus goes in for an awareness account of love—to use his memorable phrase, “love is an arresting awareness of value in a person” (362). As I understand it, this makes love compatible with impartiality because it is merely a certain type of recognition of value. It does not have any connection to partiality, either practically or in thought.² He does not deny that partiality is sometimes justified; it is just not justified by the reasons of love (see the last section of Velleman 1999).

Setiya (2014) has a radically different view. For him, what is essential to love is a disposition to be partial towards the beloved. What he means is that this disposition is justified by the reasons of love whether or not you have any other attitudes related to love. The justification for this disposition by the reasons of love is therefore “categorical.”

My understanding of love the attitude is a mixture of these two views. I agree with Velleman that the foundational loving response is a sort of appreciative awareness of the beloved’s value. Being in this state at some point is essential for love, and the reasons for it are categorical in Setiya’s sense—the reasons for love always make appreciative awareness fitting. But the reasons for being in this state are very often sufficient reasons for a whole constellation of attitudes—from desires to help the beloved and be with them, to intentions to form relationships, to dispositions to be emotionally vulnerable to their weal and woe. To give this constellation a name, this is what it is to care about the beloved. I agree with Velleman that none of these further attitudes are essential to love the way that appreciative awareness is, and the reasons to care are not categorical in Setiya’s sense. Very often the reasons of love provide reasons to care, sometimes they don’t. Nevertheless, particular instances of caring very often constitute token instances of love.³

It is crucial to understand the relationship between appreciative awareness and caring. As I think everyone knows, one can love at particular times without being in the appreciative perceptual state. Such states are essentially occurrent and conscious. They have a distinctive phenomenology. Love cannot always be like this. After all, most loving attitudes of any particular person are not occurrent or conscious at any given time. I love my father-in-law and have since roughly 2005. But I haven’t been consciously appreciatively aware of his value for 19 straight years. For most of that time, my love has been non-occurrent and unconscious. It has been a standing attitude of mine.

To see how to reconcile the claim that love is perceptual with the claim that most love is a standing attitude, we should consider the relationship between visual perception and visual perceptual beliefs. I believe that my kitchen table is black. This is a visual perceptual belief. But often it is merely a standing attitude of mine. I usually am not perceiving my table despite the fact that I do have the visual perceptual belief that it is black across time. The belief is a standing belief because neither its nature nor its continued existence depends on a current perception. But it is a perceptual belief because it is sourced in perception—that’s where it came from, both causally and rationally.

Appreciative awareness and caring are related in a similar way, I think. Caring can sometimes constitute one’s love for someone, even though the nature and continued existence of one’s caring does not depend on a current perceptual state. But whenever one’s caring constitutes one’s loving, that caring is sourced in a loving perceptual state. This differentiates the person who lovingly cares from someone who cares for some other reason—e.g., because they will prudentially benefit if things go well for someone.

This picture of love won’t be crucial for many things I say, but it will be at some points along the way. It will also give the reader a better idea of what I take my view’s predictions to be.

1.2. Romance and Constancy

Now let me motivate and explicate my view about what makes love fitting. The motivation comes from a tension between our judgments about two different kinds of case. Here is the first case.⁴

Soulmates. Italo and Ifrah are in love. In fact, they are good candidates for being soulmates. They share a deep, long-term, stable affection. They each find the other completely compelling. They are committed to each other for the long haul, and they mutually enrich each other’s lives. Their lives have become intertwined, which is something they both want deeply.⁵

Italo and Ifrah’s relationship, we can suppose, exemplifies an ideal romantic-sexual partnership. It is, at the very least, an approximation of Montaigne’s mythical relationship with Étiene de la Boétie, a relationship that Montaigne described like this (de Montaigne 1958: 99):⁶

Our souls travelled so unitedly together, they felt so strong an affection for one another, and with this same affection saw into the very depths of each other’s hearts, that not only did I know his as well as my own, but I should certainly have trusted myself more freely to him than to myself.

The first plank of our puzzle is provided by considerations about what justifies Italo and Ifrah’s love in this case. We can start by thinking about an extreme view that rejects the idea that love is the sort of thing that can be justified. This view, anti-rationalism, maintains that Ifrah and Italo are neither justified nor unjustified. Love, for the anti-rationalist, is beyond the scope of the justified.⁷

While this view has a pleasant egalitarian air—someone can love you without reproach no matter how bad you are!—it does not fare well upon scrutiny. One path to seeing why is to note that to say that love is beyond the scope of justification is tantamount to saying that no one is lovable. To be lovable is to be the fitting object of love. But for you to be the fitting object of love is for you to be, at least possibly, the beloved of a justified lover. So, rather than saving a pleasant egalitarianism, anti-rationalism actually predicts a terrible sort of egalitarianism—you aren’t the fitting object of love no matter how good you are!

This problem plays out with Italo and Ifrah. Ifrah (or Italo) would rightly be miffed to learn that not only does she fail to have some feature that makes her lovable for Italo, it is actually impossible for her to have such a feature. Italo might be psychologically compelled to love her by certain features of hers—her physical beauty, sharp wit, love of whisky and Rilke—but these go absolutely no distance towards justifying his love. His love is not even the right kind of thing for that.

Ifrah, like Montaigne, is likely to have none of this. She is a fitting object of love. Thus, some sort of rationalist view must be true for their love—some view that says that love does admit of justification and thus that at least some are lovable. There is a large range of rationalist views. Some of them provide more natural explanations of Ifrah and Italo’s justifications than others.

One view that is particularly well suited to explaining the sort of romantic love shared by Ifrah and Italo is the Neo-Platonic view. This view maintains that the proper object of love is beauty.⁸ According to this view, Italo’s love is justified by Ifrah’s beauty.⁹ This explanation is likely more agreeable to Ifrah than the anti-rationalist one.¹⁰ There is a certain romance to it; were Italo to outline Ifrah’s particular beauty by way of explaining his love for her, she would naturally find it romantic.¹¹

I myself am attracted to the neo-Platonic view or something near enough. Unfortunately, the view has a difficult time with our second sort of case. This kind of case threatens, at the very least, to show that a romantic view cannot provide a unified account of love’s justification.¹²

Old Spouses. Italo and Ifrah have grown old. Ifrah has remained very similar to the way she was when she was younger. Italo, on the other hand, has changed significantly. He has become more secretive, irritable, and reckless. This is partly out of boredom and partly because of a slow decline in some of his capacities.

Ifrah is in a difficult but familiar situation. While it might be permissible for her love for Italo to wane, it also seems monstrous to think that she is forbidden from continuing to love him. Yet, romantic views seem to predict the monstrous. If Ifrah’s love was justified by Italo’s particularities, then it looks like her justification disappeared when those particularities disappeared. If that is so, then it is no longer fitting to love Italo and Ifrah is thus forbidden from doing so.

This prediction motivates a second type of rationalist view.¹³ This view, the Kantian view, maintains that everyone shares a common feature that makes them lovable.¹⁴ Kantians are universalists about lovability. They thus capture the sort of egalitarianism that anti-rationalists were striving for. According to the Kantian view, all love is made fitting by this common feature.¹⁵

This view predicts that Ifrah can permissibly continue to love Italo.¹⁶ For it predicts that just so long as Italo is a person, there is adequate justification to love him.

So the Kantian view does a good job explaining why Italo continues to be lovable, despite massive change. But it does less well explaining the justification of their love when they were younger. Sure, it does better than the anti-rationalist view, but Ifrah would still be reasonably miffed if she found out that what justifies Italo’s love for her is just the fact that she is a person! If she gets worried about just why it is her that Italo loves rather than her great romantic rival, the Kantian view will leave her with cold comfort. Not only is she lovable on the same grounds as her romantic rival, she is lovable on the same grounds as every other person, no matter what they are like.

This tension between a romantic justification of Italo and Ifrah’s young love and a sufficiently egalitarian justification of Ifrah’s future love lays bare problems for both the neo-Platonic view and the Kantian view—or, more broadly, between romantic and egalitarian views. To dissolve this tension, a view needs to be able to explain both the Romantic Constraint and the Stability Constraint:

Romantic Constraint: Romantic love is justified by the particularities of the beloved

Stability Constraint: The fittingness condition of love is stable enough to sustain lovability across radical change

I will ultimately side more with the neo-Platonic reaction than with the pure Kantian reaction, but I think that we can do more to explain the appeal of this reaction by considering the metaphysical structure of the object of love. This will both let us give a unified explanation of Ifrah and Italo’s love in each case.

1.3. Romantic Kantianism about Lovability

The central formal commitment of the Kantian view is that all persons share some feature that makes each of them lovable. To give this feature a name, let’s call it dignity.¹⁷ This is a formal commitment because it is a not a view about what dignity consists in; it is merely the view that there is some feature shared by all that makes them lovable. This formal commitment on its own allows the Kantian to capture the Stability Constraint. Italo remains lovable just so long as he remains a person.

Kant’s substantive view about dignity maintains that dignity consists in bare rational nature. Others views have been defended—e.g., Setiya (2014) maintains that being human is sufficient for having dignity. Romantic Kantianism, at this point, is neutral about what dignity is.

No matter what it is, we can ask questions about the type of feature that it is. We can resolve our tension, I claim, by adopting the right sort of view about this. On my view, dignity is a determinable property that is made determinate by particular features of individual persons. Both the determinable feature—having dignity—and the determinate ways in which individuals have this feature are normatively relevant. The particular features of individuals that make their dignity determinate provide reasons to love them. This is how Ifrah’s particularities get into the justification. Her particular manifestation of dignity justifies Italo’s love. This is what allows Romantic Kantianism to explain the Romantic Constraint. Italo’s love is justified by Ifrah’s particularities. For it is in her particularities that her dignity is manifested.

That’s the view. It will help to explain the view’s crucial notion: The manifestation of dignity.

The paradigmatic determinable properties are colors. So <red>¹⁸ is a determinable property. Whenever it is instantiated, it is instantiated by a determinate shade of red. All of the things that are red have something in common—they all instantiate <red>—but they all are red by manifesting determinate shades of red. The point becomes very clear if you imagine a world and time where, for each shade of red, that shade is instantiated by exactly one object. All of the red objects would have something in common—instantiating <red>—even though none of the red objects would share a determinate shade.

The appeal of this view about dignity is more easily appreciated by thinking about aesthetic values. For in the case of aesthetic values it is obvious that the particularities make all the difference.¹⁹ Many paintings are graceful. Grace is a determinable property. Gracefulness in painting does not have a common look. There is not a look that all the graceful paintings share, just as there is not a color look that all the red objects share. The grace of a particular painting is utterly determinate. This goes a long way towards explaining why loving one graceful painting does not commit you to having to love all of them. The grace of a Holbein portrait might be radically different from the grace of a Renoir garden scene. What one loves about the Holbein is its determinate grace, not the fact that it is graceful. Loving the determinate grace of the Holbein thus doesn’t demand loving the determinate grace of the Renoir.

The same goes, I claim, with people and their dignity. For any particular person, what makes them lovable is their determinate dignity. These are constituted by very particular aspects of people. Romantic Kantianism is romantic insofar as it maintains that these particular aspects constitute what makes individuals lovable; it is Kantian insofar as its maintains that everyone has some particular aspects that are the determinates of the determinable property of dignity. So everyone is lovable in virtue of having dignity. But the determinate features that make individuals lovable are diverse.

The view, officially stated, is Romantic Kantianism about Lovability.

Romantic Kantianism about Lovability

The Kantian Claim: Every person is lovable in virtue of having dignity.

The Romantic Claim: Every person has dignity in virtue of manifesting an utterly determinate dignity.

The view that dignity is what makes one lovable is not new. Indeed, this is a canonical statement of the Kantian view. But: For the most part, it seems, philosophers have not thought of dignity as a determinable property. Instead, they have thought of it as the sort of property that has the same nature across individuals. This is, indeed, the source of many forceful objections to Kantian views about the nature of dignity. Here is Dillon (1992) talking about respecting dignity:²⁰

The problem with the Kantian conception is that it does not have the resources to enable us in respecting[/loving] persons (as opposed to dealing with them in other moral modes) to transcend the abstractness of person as such in order to focus on and respect the individual human being as herself (118).

This problem falls away if we think of <dignity> as a determinable. As we saw, all we need when it comes to Ifrah’s continued love of Italo is some sort of universalism. It is plausible that intellectually compromised humans have dignity; this is what explains why they have a moral status. But that is all that is required. Whether <dignity> is a determinable or not makes no difference to the explanation of Ifrah’s constancy.

This does make a difference when it comes to our explanation of Italo’s justification for loving younger Ifrah. If <dignity> is a determinable, then it is always instantiated by a determinate manifestation. Ifrah has her own way of having dignity. This way might be the sort of thing that can be duplicated—it might be that there can be multiple instances of it—but it is nevertheless highly particular. It is at least part of what makes Ifrah Ifrah. So if it is Ifrah’s determinate way of being dignified that justifies Italo’s love, Ifrah’s particularities are essential to Italo’s justification.²¹

The same cannot be said for Kantian views that maintain that <dignity> is not a determinable. If Kant or Velleman (1999) are right, then Italo is justified because Ifrah has certain bare rational capacities. But Italo also has this very same justification for loving Ifrah’s romantic rival, or for loving Donald Trump, or Charles Manson, or his repulsive colleague. It might be true that all of those people have dignity, but their way of being dignified might be out of Italo’s reach or it simply might not be appealing absent some sort of transformative experience.

This reasoning shows, I think, that it is independently plausible that <dignity> is a determinable property. One appealing aspect of Kant’s moral philosophy is its egalitarianism. It explains what it is that makes us morally equal. It is our dignity. But this also threatens to wipe out our individuality. It threatens to reduce us to some shared feature that, while important, does not do justice to the diversity of agency. But if <dignity> is a determinable, we can hold on to both the egalitarianism and do justice to diversity. What is important is both that we have dignity and that we all dignified in highly particular determinate ways.

Readers of Setiya (2014) will know that Setiya argues against views that appeal to particularities when explaining the fittingness conditions of love.²² Setiya’s basic idea is that particularities cannot be the non-redundant fount of lovability. This is because if, for example, young Ifrah’s sharp wit and integrity are the non-redundant sources of her lovability and it is possible for her to not have those features, then it’s possible for her not to be lovable. But Old Spouses shows that that is objectionable. Setiya’s reaction to this is that we cannot appeal to particularities in order to explain lovability. Instead, we have to appeal to some property that is universally shared—he (tentatively) opts for the property of being human.

The devil is in the details of redundancy. If Kantianism of any form is true, then all persons are guaranteed to have a feature that makes them lovable. So any particularity is modally redundant in the sense that whether one has that particular feature is not necessary to explaining their lovability across modal space. Setiya is presumably thinking that this shows that particularities are explanatorily otiose. All we need to do is appeal to dignity in order to explain lovability.

But this assumes that there isn’t an explanatory connection between dignity and more particular features. Romantic Kantianism about Lovability ineliminably ties dignity to particularities. People have dignity in virtue of having particular determinate features. This will be so in all worlds where they have dignity. Now, of course, it won’t be true that in all worlds where they have dignity, they have dignity in virtue of the particular determinate features that ground their dignity in the actual world. So, in one way, any individual’s particular way of having dignity is superfluous to a perfectly legitimate explanation of their lovability. They are lovable because they have dignity!

But that does not mean that the full (constitutive) explanation of their lovability lacks appeal to the particularities.²³ Setiya thinks that particularities are superfluous tout court. He thinks that people are lovable because they are human, full stop. Not so according to Romantic Kantianism about Lovability. You cannot explain an individual’s dignity without appeal to their particularities. So a complete explanation of Ifrah’s dignity in the actual world must appeal to her sharp wit and integrity. In worlds where she lacks those features, a complete explanation of her dignity in that world needs to appeal to other particularities. This is just another way of seeing that Romantic Kantianism about Lovability finds the particular in the general. This allows for a satisfying explanation of love’s constancy. It allows the view to give the official Kantian line about lovability across change but it also allows for an ineliminable appeal to particularities.

The preceding is about the structure of the ethical explanation of lovability. It is also worth considering Romantic Kantianism’s implications for the psychological explanation of particular loves. A sizable corner of the debate about love’s justification has to do with the resources various views have for explaining love’s motivations. Theorists like Keller (2013) and Jollimore (2011) complain that some views don’t leave room for particularities being the motivation for love, as they seem to obviously be.²⁴ Romantic Kantianism, unlike its main Kantian competitors, does allow particularities to be the proper motivation for love. That is because particularities provide reasons for love in virtue of being the determinates of dignity.

Or so it seems. One might worry that particular instances of unconditional love can’t be motivated by particularities, if Romantic Kantianism is right.²⁵ Imagine that, when they are young, Ifrah loves Italo for his youthful vigor and delight. Over time Italo loses these qualities, up to the point where he is in Old Spouses. We can imagine that Ifrah’s love is unconditional in the sense that she will love him across these changes. Given this, is it true that she once loved him for his youthful vigor and joy? Or did she love him for a feature he had across time—perhaps, the fact that he has dignity?

There are two things to say in reply. First, I think that it’s possible that Ifrah’s love is unconditional in this way, and that this in fact would be justified. The fact that Italo has dignity is a sufficient reason to love him. What is important about Romantic Kantianism is that it also makes room for the particularities. Most loves—and certainly most instances of caring—are not unconditional, and for good reason. Romantic Kantianism does a much better job explaining how this works than rival views.

The second—less conciliatory—thing to say is that it is possible for Ifrah to love Italo for his particularities even if her love is unconditional. The basis for her love might change as Italo changes. Compare this with her belief that she exists. She likely has this belief just so long as she is a conscious agent; the existence of the belief is not conditioned on (non-lethal) changes to Ifrah. But the grounds for it might be changing quite a bit across time. She might believe she exists on Tuesday because she is thinking on Tuesday, believe she exists on Wednesday because she is thinking on Wednesday etc. So resilience to change does not entail (perfect) stability in motivational grounds. Ifrah’s love might be like this (although presumably not changing on a daily basis!).²⁶ This, it seems to me, is a better way for Ifrah’s love to be unconditional because it is sensitive to how Italo actually is in particular, rather than focusing on such a generic property.

Readers of Velleman (1999) will know that he addresses objections like Dillon’s in defense of Kant’s view. In so doing, he comes quite close to accepting that dignity is a determinable. Velleman parts with Kant insofar as he maintains that love—unlike respect—“is not felt in contemplation of a mere concept or idea” (371). Instead, “the immediate object of love $\mathrm{\dots }$ is the manifest person, embodied in flesh and blood and accessible to the senses.” Further contrasting respect and love, Velleman concludes

grasping someone’s personhood intellectually may be enough to make us respect him, but unless we actually see a person in the human being confronting us, we won’t be moved to love; and we can see the person only by seeing him in or through his empirical persona (371).

As we’ll see later, I think that there is something deeply important here. However, Velleman is not endorsing the Romantic Claim. Rather, he thinks that acquaintance with “the manifest person” is merely what gives us access to the abstract property of dignity. This is clearest when he says that “loving a person for the way he walks is not a response to the value of his gait; it’s rather a response to his gait as an expression or symbol or reminder of his value as a person” (371). The gait merely provides us with a symbol, reminder, or expression of something else—viz., his bare rational capacities.

This forces him to admit that, at bottom, the particularity of individuals is irrelevant to the explanation of their lovability. In response to the objection that this washes out individuality, Velleman maintains that people can be loved for themselves because items with dignity are incomparable—this is just what it is to have dignity rather than a price. This is an axiological feature of things with dignity. The proper response to this axiological fact is to treat the beloved as irreplaceable. So treating is the way in which people can be loved for themselves, according to Velleman.

I don’t want to officially deny Velleman’s axiological claim, although its deontic upshots—that people are irreplaceable in virtue of not having a price—seem more plausible when it comes to respect rather than love. Instead, I want to point out that it’s not clear why we need to bite Velleman’s bullets once Romantic Kantianism is made explicit. Romantic Kantianism, in contrast to Kant and Velleman’s view, maintains that the person’s gait might itself partly constitute the person’s dignity. In other words, if one is to ask where the person’s dignity might be found, one place we can point to is in his gait. Romantic Kantianism thus builds the particularities in much deeper than Velleman’s view. Velleman sticks with Kant in thinking that dignity solely consists in an abstract feature that everyone shares. He recognizes that acquaintance with particular people makes a difference when it comes to love, but not a big enough difference to fully capture the Romantic Constraint.

***

The main point of this section is formal in the sense that you can accept Romantic Kantianism about Lovability without being committed to any particular view about what dignity consists in as a substantive matter. The important commitment is merely about the type of property dignity is. But, obviously enough, the ultimate plausibility of the view can’t be assessed without a substantive view about dignity. Here’s a sketch of a view that can be accurately called Kantian: The particular determinates of one’s dignity are related to one’s agential perspective on the world. What is special about those with moral status is that they have agential capacities that allow them to have a perspective on the world. Different types of morally relevant creatures have different types of capacities. Humans have a particularly robust set of intelligent capacities that allow our perspectives to be particularly capacious; we have perspectives on ourselves, numbers, philosophical questions, the microphysical, and on and on.²⁷

The types of features that play the determinate role are variegated. One’s gait can play this role; it can be a distinctive part of your perspective—after all, it can be part of your style, which is centrally connected to your perspective. This perspective is, further, an organic unity. The value of the whole can be greater than the summing of the value of its parts. For at least some people, the parts of their perspective might not be particularly valuable, but the whole that they ground is. Indeed, for some people, some of the parts might be disvaluable. So, the features needn’t all be values, nor virtues, nor morally good.^28,29

This view is Kantian insofar as it ties what is of fundamental ethical significance to our agential capacities. It does this in a way that appeals to particularities.³⁰ It also makes manifest a problem for any such view, a problem one can see as motivating generic Kantian views. The problem is that not all individual perspectives seem apt to inspire love. A truly vicious person uses their agential capacities to have a perspective on the world. But this doesn’t seem to be the right sort of thing to make love fitting. This motivates the idea that if universalism is true, love must be fitting in virtue of some generic universal property—e.g., the fact that one has intelligent capacities per se.³¹

The sting of this problem depends on how perspectivally pervasive vice can be. I submit that for the vast majority of vicious people, there are particularities grounded in their perspectives that make potential (rational) love at least intelligible. This is why there are usually people who intelligibly love them. Call this the Mother Test: Are there features that make a mother’s love intelligible? If there are, then I think that that person really does have a determinate dignity.³²

Perhaps it is possible for vice to be more deeply rooted, to permeate every corner of one’s perspective. This, I submit, would be a big problem for the Kantian (universalist) claim. I don’t think it spoils the spirit of the view, though. My reaction would be to admit that not every possible intelligent creature is lovable. If vice has completely infiltrated your perspective to the point where it would not be intelligible for your mother to love you for part of who you are, you are outside of the lovable. The vast, vast majority of people who are not like this are lovable in virtue of their manifested perspectives.³³

These replies are directed largely to my Kantian brethren, who take these cases to motivate a generic fittingness condition. Others will take these cases to militate against universalism directly. To those I’ll add this: Remember that my universalism only says that appreciative awareness is always fitting. It doesn’t say caring is always permitted. In many cases, the loving mothers of the vicious should insulate their caring attitudes and, most importantly perhaps, their caring actions. Appreciative awareness is fitting, but only from afar, the tragedy of which will be keenly felt.

2.1. Love and Respect: Part I

So far the anchoring focus has been on the relationship between dignity and love. Whilst this relationship is important to Kant’s—and Kantian—ethics, it is of course not right at the center of Kant’s ethics. Rather, the relationship between dignity and respect is right at the center.³⁵ The core deontological aspects of Kantian ethics flow from the nature of respect for dignity. Respecting dignity demands that we treat people as non-fungible and that we are not paternalistic, at the very least.³⁶ If we are required to respect dignity, then there are serious constraints on what we can do to promote our interests and the good. This is the heart of Kantian ethics.

Both love and respect are responses to the same value—viz., dignity. In other words, dignity is the fittingness condition for both love and respect. Given this, we should expect there to be a tight relationship between the two. Indeed, Kantians generally do posit a tight relationship. Here is (Velleman 1999: 366) again:

I regard respect and love as the required minimum and optional maximum responses to one and the same value.

While there is something intuitive about this view, it is not clear if Velleman has a particularly good explanation of why it is true.

Further, there is an important ambiguity between a subjective and objective reading of these deontic claims. When something has an objective deontic status, the balance of all of the reasons supports that status. Thus, if $\varphi$-ing is objectively permitted, then, given all the facts, the reasons in favor of $\varphi$-ing are at least as weighty as the reasons against $\varphi$-ing. There is a second important type of deontic property, though. I will call them subjective deontic properties. The reasons that are relevant to the subjective weighings of reasons are the reasons that are possessed.³⁷ The reasons that are possessed for an agent $A$ are the reasons in $A$’s ken. The fact that Anne is smiling is a reason to believe that she’s happy, but if I am completely in the dark about whether she’s smiling, I do not possess that reason as a reason to believe she is happy. If I see her smiling, on the other hand, then I do possess that reason and it thus makes a difference to the subjective weighing. In the next sub-section the subjective weighing will reveal its importance.

What Velleman means, I think, is that respect and love are objectively required and permitted. We already have an explanation of the claim that love is objectively permitted. This follows from the claims that dignity is the fittingness condition for love and the claim that there is always objectively sufficient reason to have an attitude that is fitting.

This leads, though, to a bit of a puzzle about respect. Dignity is also the fittingness condition of respect. Usually, fittingness is tied to permissibility. One is objectively permitted to believe truths; one is objectively permitted to fear the dangerous; one is objectively permitted to desire the good. Etc.³⁸ The Kantian view of respect seems to make an exception of respect. It maintains that respect is objectively required towards those with dignity. Why think that respect is an exception?

Here are two Kantian answers. The first is that dignity itself is a particularly special value.³⁹ It is a value that is inherently demanding. This is partly because of the contrast between having dignity and having a price. To have dignity is to not have a price. But this on its own has deontic consequences because only things with prices can be traded against each other. So if those with dignity have no price, you simply can’t trade them against each other. Failing to respect things with dignity is to treat them like they have a price. Thus, failing to respect is forbidden and respect is required.

A second answer, defended by Bader (2023), maintains that having dignity is fundamentally a deontic status. On Bader’s view, we can’t explain dignity’s pride of place by appealing to its value. That would be surprising if we are textbook Kantians who think the right is not derived from the good! Instead, Bader thinks that having dignity is best understood as a deontic category. The later parts of the story are similar to the above. Having a price has a certain deontic role to play—things with prices compete against each other in a certain way. Having dignity is a different story. To have dignity just is to demand a certain response.

This helps some by showing that dignity has a special deontic role. But it doesn’t get us fully there. That is because it doesn’t fully explain the sorts of cases that motivate thinking that fittingness is merely connected with permission. The main reason why we’re not objectively required to believe all of the truths is that this would be too demanding. For one, for any particular person, that person hasn’t even considered the vast majority of truths. Further, they simply couldn’t. This is strong reason to think that they aren’t required to believe every truth. But, of course, we can say similar things about those with dignity. For any particular person, they have never even considered billions of people. Indeed, for any particular person, there are billions of people that person simply cannot have attitudes about! One needs to have some sort of contact with a person in order to have so-called singular thoughts about them.

I think that two things should be said about this. First, the obvious point: When it comes to any particular people $A$ and $B$, $A$ is objectively required to respect $B$ if $A$ has the ability to have singular thoughts about $B$. This avoids the problem above. Inspired by White (2025), I will call this sort of respect particular respect. It is particular because it takes particular people as its object. The point is that everyone is objectively required to particularly respect all of the people that they conceptually can have that attitude towards—i.e., all of the people they can have singular thoughts about.

The second point also draws on White (2025). In addition to particular respect, there is also general respect. The object of this attitude is all things with dignity. On one understanding of respect for all things with dignity, it is just respect for each individual thing with dignity. White argues that there is another way to understand it, though. This can be shown with a more restricted case. Suppose Jack respects all of the Millers. This could just mean that, for every Miller, Jack respect that Miller. But it needn’t. We can see this by noticing that Jack’s love might extend to Millers he is not acquainted with. So, for example, when a new Miller is born, Jack’s respect might immediately extend to that Miller even though Jack is not in a position to have the new Miller as the object of particular respect. This is good evidence that the object of Jack’s respect for the Millers is a “general object.” It is the Millers, full stop.

With this we can say something further. Namely, given the nature of dignity, everyone is objectively required to respect those with dignity, where the object of this respect is the general object of those with dignity. This, again, flows from the distinctive deontic consequences of dignity.

While this is not a full explanation, it is as much as can be given here. If it is right, then we have Fitting Respect Exceptions 1 and 2:

Fittingness Respect Exception 1: When $A$ has the ability to have singular thoughts about $B$, it is fitting for $A$ to have particular respect for $B$ just in case there are objectively decisive reasons to respect $B$.

Fittingness Respect Exception 2: It is fitting to have general respect for those with dignity just in case there are objectively decisive reasons to have general respect for those with dignity.

These are exceptions because generally all that is true that it is objectively permitted to have fitting attitudes. The Fittingness Respect Exceptions tie fitting respect to requirements.

Now we have something of an explanation of Velleman’s claims. Respect is the required minimum because of the nature of dignity. It is inherently demanding, unlike other fittingness conditions. Love is the permitted maximum because fitting love, like other fitting attitudes, is tied to objectively sufficient reasons. It is fitting to love $A$ just in case there are objectively sufficient reasons to love $A$.

2.2. Love and Respect: Part II

The last subsection was about the objective deontic facts. This subsection is about the subjective deontic facts. Let’s start with the very general distinction between $\varphi$-ing being fitting and someone fittingly $\varphi$-ing. This distinction is well illustrated by comparing mere true belief and knowledgable belief. Belief is fitting just in case its object is true. However, more is needed in order to fittingly believe. If one guesses the right answer, they have a belief that is fitting but they don’t fittingly believe. Plausibly, one fittingly believes just in case one knows. In order to fittingly believe, one needs to be in contact with the truth, whereas one can have a fitting belief even if one guesses.

All attitudes that can be fitting admit of this distinction. Given this, we can inquire into what it takes for a particular attitude to be fitting without saying what it takes to fittingly have that attitude. But if we’re interested in what it takes for token instances of an attitude to be held fittingly, we need to say something about what it takes for someone to be in contact with the fittingness conditions in the right way to have that attitude fittingly.

What goes for belief goes for love. Above I argued that love is fitting when its object has dignity. One’s dignity will always be grounded in one’s particularities. Given this, one’s particularities will provide reasons to love. The Kantian Claim guarantees that everyone has dignity and thus everyone has some particularities that provide reasons to love. These reasons are always objectively sufficient, which is to say, for every person $B$, if you weigh up all of the reasons to love $B$ against all of the reasons not to love $B$, the reasons to love will always be at least as weighty as the reasons not to love.

These are just claims about fitting love. They are not yet claims about fittingly loving. For any truth $p$, there are objectively sufficient reasons to believe $p$. This follows from the claim that truth is what makes belief fitting. But, of course, it is not the case that for any truth $p$ and any agent $A$, $A$ is in a position to fittingly believe $p$. That would amount to the claim that everyone is in a position to know every truth! Given this, it would be very surprising to find out that every agent is in a position to fittingly love everyone. This manifestly does not follow from the claim that everyone is lovable. As we’ll see, this has profound consequences for the ethics of love, and is an aid to common sense.

What does it take to fittingly $\varphi$? One important part of the puzzle is that whenever one fittingly $\varphi$s, one $\varphi$s on the basis of sufficient possessed reasons to $\varphi$. The possessed reasons to $\varphi$ are subjectively sufficient when they are at least as weighty as the possessed reasons against $\varphi$-ing. This on its own explains why most people aren’t in a position to know most truths. It is because they do not possess subjectively sufficient reasons to believe most truths. Most of the reasons to believe most of the truths are outside of any particular person’s ken.⁴⁰

This gives us a more tractable question. What does it take to possess reasons to love? To start towards an answer, recall the second half of a Velleman quote from above:

unless we actually see a person in the human being confronting us, we won’t be moved to love; and we can see the person only by seeing him in or through his empirical persona (Velleman 1999: 371)

Velleman is crucially ambiguous between a purely descriptive reading and a normative reading. On the descriptive reading, it is a mere psychological fact that we won’t be “moved to love” unless we see a person. On the normative reading, it is in some sense impermissible to love without seeing the person. I think that the normative reading is correct. It is correct because in order to possess the reasons of love, we need to be acquainted with the dignity of the beloved. And without possessing the reasons of love, we can’t fittingly love. So when we fail to be acquainted, we can’t fittingly love.

This is explained by the fact that love is an appreciative reaction to utterly determinate values. Again the paradigm here are aesthetic properties.⁴¹ The gracefulness of the Holbein is utterly determinate. Because of this, in order to fully appreciate it, one needs to be acquainted with it. Dignity, on my view, is like grace in this way. Each instance of dignity is utterly determinate and, because of this, in order to fully appreciate it—in order to fittingly love it—one needs to be acquainted with it.

This gets us The Acquaintance Condition:

The Acquaintance Condition: $A$ possesses reasons to love $B$ only if $A$ is acquainted with $B$’s determinate dignity.

This is enough to explain why not everyone is in a position to fittingly love everyone else despite everyone being lovable. It is because we are acquainted with the determinate dignity of a relatively small number of people. We thus fail to possess reasons to love most people and are thus not in a position to fittingly love most people.

What about the deontic significance of the possessed reasons to love? The default for the subjective weighing of the reasons is the same as the default for the objective weighing of the reasons. This gets us Subjectively Sufficient Love:

Subjectively Sufficient Love: If $A$ becomes acquainted with the dignity of $B$, then $A$ possesses subjectively sufficient reasons to love $B$.

In other words, $A$ is permitted to love $B$ whenever $A$ is acquainted with $B$’s dignity. $A$ is thus in a position to fittingly love $B$ whenever $A$ is acquainted with $B$’s dignity. Now, of course, even if one has sufficient reasons to love, it doesn’t follow that one is required to love. (Below I will argue that sometimes we are required to love, and explain how this is determined.⁴²)

That’s fittingly loving. What about respect? Now consider the first part of the Velleman (371) quote:

Grasping someone’s personhood intellectually may be enough to make us respect him

Although this is hedged, it seems clear that Velleman agrees with Kant that one merely knowing someone is a person is enough to get one to respect them. As before, this is ambiguous between a descriptive and normative reading. I think a normative reading is true. Namely, I think the fact that someone is a person is a reason to respect them, and that one can possess this reason merely by knowing that someone is a person. Thus, there is, as Velleman says, an important difference between love and respect. Merely knowing someone is a person is enough to possess a reason to respect them, whereas this is not enough for love. For love, one needs to be acquainted with the determinate dignity of the person.

Now we are in a position to state one of the core subjective ethical claims of Romantic Kantianism. I’ll call it Subjectively Decisive Respect:

Subjectively Decisive Respect: If $A$ knows that $B$ is a person, then $A$ possesses a subjectively decisive reason to respect $B$

It follows from this claim that if $A$ knows that $B$ is a person, then $A$ is in a position to fittingly respect $B$. The most surprising aspect of this claim, though, is that it states that knowing someone is a person is a sufficient condition for possessing subjectively decisive reason to respect that person. This makes the reason to respect very special; it makes it undefeatable. Once you possess this reason, you cannot come to possess some reason that defeats it.⁴³

This is, in effect, the reason-theoretic codification of the central deontological nature of Kantian ethics. It is also the subjective analog of Fittingness Respect Exception 1. These two claims together are Romantic Kantianism’s version of the core Kantian requirement to respect persons.

***

Romantic Kantianism’s package of ethical claims explains a central pair of Velleman’s Kantian commitments. First, it explains why respect is the required minimum and love is the permitted maximum reaction to dignity. The former claim is true because respect is both objectively and subjectively demanded by the fact that someone has dignity. It is objectively demanded just so long as one has the ability to have singular thoughts about the object of respect. It is subjectively demanded just so long as one knows that the object has dignity or is a person. The latter claim is true because love is both objectively and subjectively permitted by the fact that someone has dignity. It is objectively permitted because dignity is the fittingness condition of love. It is subjectively permitted whenever one is acquainted with the dignity of the beloved.

The second claim of Velleman’s that Romantic Kantianism explains is the fact that there is a crucial asymmetry between love and respect. On the one hand, respect is demanded just so long as one knows that someone is a person. On the other hand, fittingly loving requires one to be acquainted with the beloved. Romantic Kantianism explains this because it maintains that the conditions under which one possesses a reason to respect are different than the conditions under which one possesses a reason to love. Acquaintance is required for possessing the reasons to love, whereas mere knowledge is enough when it comes to reasons to respect.

3.1. The Three Problems

Focus on young Ifrah and Italo. Ifrah has a highly particular determinate way of manifesting dignity. Her way of being dignified provides particular reasons to love her. For example, her sharp wit and integrity provide particular reasons to love her. This is in virtue of those features being part of her manifestation of dignity. Italo’s actual love is justified by these reasons (amongst others associated with Ifrah’s particular dignity).

3.2. Solving the Problems