Many think that love would be a casualty of free will skepticism. I disagree. I argue that love would be largely unaffected if we came to deny free will, not simply because we cannot shake the attitude, but because love is not chosen, nor do we want it to be. Here, I am not alone; others have reached similar conclusions. But a few important distinctions have been overlooked. Even if hard incompatibilism is true, not all love is equal. Although we (...) have only minimal control over love, it can be more or less authentic. I develop my position by considering the fictional trope of love potions and the implications of a futuristic psychotropic, Lovezac—Viagra for the heart. But I am not as optimistic as some. Even though free will skepticism would not jeopardize love-the-feeling, there are reasons to think that loving relationships might not be immune. (shrink)

Although we can try to explain why we love, we can never justify our love. Love is neither based on reasons, nor responsive to reasons, nor can it be assessed for normative reasons. Love can be odd, unfortunate, fortuitous, or even sadly lacking, but it can never be appropriate or inappropriate. We may have reasons to act on our love, but we cannot justify our loving feelings. Shakespeare's Bottom is right: "Reason and love keep little company together now-a-days." Indeed, they (...) keep none and they never kept any: there are no justifying reasons for love. (shrink)

The paper critically discusses the thesis, originally put forth by Taylor, that there is a form of envy whose target is the good possessed by someone else. Section 2 analyzes the distinction between object-envy and state-envy, discusses the connection between object-envy and benign envy, and develops the ethical consequences that follow from the thesis that envy is never benign. Section 3 presents a thought experiment with five variations developed from the basic elements of object-envy: an agent, a good the agent (...) desires but lacks, and a person who possesses the good. The variations generate emotions like longing, sadness, happiness for, admiration, covetousness, self-disappointment, but they do not generate envy. Section 4 concentrates on envious self-reproach and shows that its nature and genesis are different from the self-disappointment one may experience in other forms of self-assessment. Section 5 argues that the so-called sour-grape syndrome serves different goals when it is connected to a good one lacks and when it is connected to envious comparisons. Section 6 maintains that what looks like benign envy can be better understood as emulous admiration. In conclusion, the paper argues that object-envy is not a useful concept. The desired goods are not valued in themselves when a person feels envy. Rather, they are taken to signal the superior recognition enjoyed by someone else within the reference group that is currently deemed important by the agent. (shrink)

It seems better to love virtue than vice, pleasure than pain, good than evil. Perhaps it's also better to love virtuous people than vicious people. But at the same time, it's repugnant to suggest that a mother should love her smarter, more athletic, better looking son than his dim, clumsy, ordinary brother. My task is to help sort out the conflicting intuitions about what we should love. In particular, I want to address a problem for the no-reasons view, the theory (...) that love cannot be rationally justified. Since it seems better to love good people rather than evil villains, it appears that there are indeed reasons for (or, at least, against) love. Is it coherent to talk this way and deny that love can be justified? I think so and will explain how. (shrink)

Current theories of emotion have often excluded emotional feeling from the core of emotion, thereby associating emotional feeling with high order processing. In contrast, we characterize emotional feeling as a basic process that is fundamentally involved in emotional processing. Emotional feeling is further described by the phenomenal features of unity and qualitativeness. Based on recent imaging data, we assume that neural activity in the anterior cortical midline structures is crucial for constituting emotional feeling. The phenomenal feature of unity could be (...) reflected in the connectivity pattern of the aCMS. What phenomenally is described as qualitativeness may correspond to what is psychologically termed valence. (shrink)