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  1. Love and Free Will.Aaron Smuts - manuscript
    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 (...)
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  • In Defense of the No-Reasons View of Love.Aaron Smuts -
    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 (...)
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  • Friendship.Bennett W. Helm - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Friendship, as understood here, is a distinctively personal relationship that is grounded in a concern on the part of each friend for the welfare of the other, for the other's sake, and that involves some degree of intimacy. As such, friendship is undoubtedly central to our lives, in part because the special concern we have for our friends must have a place within a broader set of concerns, including moral concerns, and in part because our friends can help shape who (...)
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  • The aesthetics of coming to know someone.James H. P. Lewis - 2023 - Philosophical Studies (5-6):1-16.
    This paper is about the similarity between the appreciation of a piece of art, such as a cherished music album, and the loving appreciation of a person whom one knows well. In philosophical discussion about the rationality of love, the Qualities View (QV) says that love can be justified by reference to the qualities of the beloved. I argue that the oft-rehearsed trading-up objection fails to undermine the QV. The problems typically identified by the objection arise from the idea that (...)
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  • Irrational Love: Taking Romeo and Juliet Seriously.Natasha McKeever & Joe Saunders - 2022 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 30 (3):254-275.
    This paper argues that there are important irrational elements to love. In the philosophical literature, we typically find that love is either thought of as rational or arational and that any irrational elements are thought to be defective, or extraneous to love itself. We argue, on the contrary, that irrationality is in part connected to what we find valuable about love. -/- We focus on 3 basic elements of love: -/- 1) Whom you love 2) How much you love them (...)
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  • Deep personal relationships, value, merit, and change.Brad Hooker - 2022 - Ratio 35 (4):344-351.
    A paper of Roger Crisp’s four years ago contained arguments that seemed to imply that having deep personal relationships does not constitute an element of well‐being. The lesson to draw from that paper of Crisp’s, according to a recent journal article of mine, is that one’s having a deep personal relationship does constitute an element of one’s well‐being on condition that one’s affection for the other person is merited. Crisp’s paper earlier in this issue of Ratio responds to my arguments. (...)
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  • The Moral Psychology of Love (or How to Think About Love): Introduction.Arina Pismenny & Berit Brogaard - 2022 - In Arina Pismenny & Berit Brogaard (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Love. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. pp. 1-10.
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  • Gender.Holly Lawford-Smith & Michael Hauskeller - 2022 - In Michael Hauskeller (ed.), The Things That Really Matter: Philosophical Conversations on the Cornerstones of Life. UCL Press. pp. 65-83.
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  • Finite Love.Joel A. Van Fossen - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    It seems like a problem to say that love can be merited—its value is located in its transcendence of comparative judgments. However, we commonly make judgments about who is and is not worth loving. We deem certain romantic partners, friends, and family members as worth or not worth our loving time, attention, and effort. In this paper, I argue that love can be merited, and it is merited because of a person’s intrinsic valuable qualities. However, it is not the fact (...)
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  • Loving People for Who They Are (Even When They Don't Love You Back).Sara Protasi - 2014 - European Journal of Philosophy 24 (1):214-234.
    The debate on love's reasons ignores unrequited love, which—I argue—can be as genuine and as valuable as reciprocated love. I start by showing that the relationship view of love cannot account for either the reasons or the value of unrequited love. I then present the simple property view, an alternative to the relationship view that is beset with its own problems. In order to solve these problems, I present a more sophisticated version of the property view that integrates ideas from (...)
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  • Love: gloriously amoral and arational.Nick Zangwill - 2013 - Philosophical Explorations 16 (3):298 - 314.
    I argue that an evaluational conception of love collides with the way we value love. That way allows that love has causes, but not reasons, and it recognizes and celebrates a love that refuses to justify itself. Love has unjustified selectivity, due to its arbitrary causes. That imposes a non-tradability norm. A love for reasons, rational love or evaluational love would be propositional, and it therefore allows that the people we love are tradable commodities. A moralized conception of love is (...)
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  • Love of Whole Persons.Ginger Clausen - 2019 - The Journal of Ethics 23 (4):347-367.
    According to quality theories of love, love is fitting by virtue of properties of the loved person. Despite their immediate plausibility, quality theories have met with many objections. Here I focus on two that strike at the heart of what makes the quality theory an appealing account of love, specifically, the theory’s ability to accommodate the fact that loving someone is a way of valuing them for who they are. The fungibility objection and the problem of love’s object maintain that (...)
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  • Does Having Deep Personal Relationships Constitute an Element of Well-Being?Brad Hooker - 2021 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 95 (1):1-24.
    Deep personal relationships involve deep mutual understanding and strong mutual affection. This paper focuses on whether having deep personal relationships is one of the elements of well-being. Roger Crisp put forward thought experiments which might be taken to suggest that having deep personal relationships has only instrumental value as a means to other elements of well-being. The different conclusion this paper draws is that having deep personal relationships is an element of well-being if, but only if, the other people involved (...)
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  • Sentimental Reasons.Edgar Phillips - 2021 - In Simon Cushing (ed.), New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving. Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 171–194.
    Much recent discussion of love concerns ‘the reasons for love’: whether we love for reasons and, if so, what sorts of things those reasons are. This chapter seeks to call into question some of the assumptions that have shaped this debate, in particular the assumption that love might be ‘responsive’ to reasons in something like the way that actions, beliefs, intentions and ordinary emotions are. I begin by drawing out some tensions in the existing literature on reasons for love, suggesting (...)
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  • Friendship as a Non-Relative Virtue.Rachel Friedman - 2021 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 20 (1).
    This article takes its bearings from Martha Nussbaum’s “Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach.” There, Nussbaum proposes an analytic framework that is intended to allow those who disagree about the virtues, in particular due to cultural differences, to engage in fruitful dialogue with one another. To explore what such an approach might look like in practice, this article considers the case study of friendship. It critiques Aristotle’s account of that virtue and provides an alternative based on contemporary understandings. By placing these (...)
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  • Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Enticing Reasons for Love.N. L. Engel-Hawbecker - 2021 - In Simon Cushing (ed.), New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving. Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 195-214.
    A central debate in the philosophy of love is whether people can love one another for good reasons. Reasons for love seem to help us sympathetically understand and evaluate love or even count as loving at all. But it can seem that if reasons for love existed, they could require forms of love that are presumably illicit. It might seem that only some form of wishful thinking would lead us to believe reasons for love could never do this. However, if (...)
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  • Love, Reasons, and Replaceability.Andrea Iacona & José Antonio Díez - 2021 - Critica 53 (158):3-21.
    Lovers typically entertain two sorts of thoughts about their beloveds. On the one hand, they think that some qualities of their beloveds provide reasons for loving them. Romeo would say that he loves Juliet in virtue of the way she is. On the other hand, they regard their beloveds as irreplaceable. Romeo would never be willing to exchange Juliet with another maiden. Yet it may be asked how these two sorts of thoughts can coherently coexist. If some qualities of Juliet (...)
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  • What can we learn about romantic love from Harry Frankfurt’s account of love?Natasha Chloe McKeever - 2019 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 14 (3).
    Harry Frankfurt has a comprehensive and, at times, compelling, account of love, which are outlined in several of his works. However, he does not think that romantic love fits the ideal of love as it ‘includes a number of vividly distracting elements, which do not belong to the essential nature of love as a mode of disinterested concern’. In this paper, I argue that we can, nonetheless, learn some important things about romantic love from his account. Furthermore, I will suggest, (...)
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  • The Metaphysics of Love: An Annotated Bibliography.Jasper Heaton & Aida Roige - 2014 - The Metaphysis of Love.
    A research resource created by the Metaphysics of Love project. -/- The Metaphysics of Love Project is an interdisciplinary investigation into the nature of romantic love, supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant and by the funding of Principal Investigator Carrie Jenkins's Canada Research Chair. The project is running from 2016 to 2019, following a successful pilot project that ran from 2014 to 2016 (funded by a Hampton Research Grant from the University of British (...)
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  • (The Varieties of) Love in Contemporary Anglophone Philosophy.Benjamin Bagley - 2018 - In Adrienne M. Martin (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy. New York: Routledge Handbooks in Philoso.
    This chapter assesses theories of the nature of personal love in Anglophone philosophy from the last two decades, sketching a case for pluralism. After rejecting arationalist views as failing to accommodate cases in which love is irrational, and contemporary quality views as giving love the wrong kind of reason, it argues that other theories only account for different subsets of what a complete theory of love should explain. It therefore concludes that while love always consists in valuing someone as a (...)
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  • Procreative-parenting, love's reasons and the demands of morality.Luara Ferracioli - 2018 - Philosophical Quarterly 68 (270):77-97.
    Many philosophers believe that the relationship between a parent and a child is objectively valuable, but few believe that there is any objective value in first creating a child in order to parent her. But if it is indeed true that all of the objective value of procreative-parenting comes from parenting, then it is hard to see how procreative-parenting can overcome two particularly pressing philosophical challenges. A first challenge is to show that it is morally permissible for prospective parents to (...)
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  • Phainomena e explicação na Ética Eudêmia de Aristóteles.Raphael Zillig - 2014 - In Zillig Raphael (ed.), Conocimiento, ética y estética en la Filosofía Antigua: Actas del II Simposio Nacional de Filosofía Antigua. Asociación Argentina de Filosofía Antigua. pp. 330-336.
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  • Is it Better to Love Better Things?Aaron Smuts - 2014 - In Christian Maurer, Tony Milligan & Kamila Pacovská (eds.), Love and Its Objects: What Can We Care For? Palgrave-Macmillan.
    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 (...)
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  • Overcoming a Euthyphro problem in personal love: Imagination and personal identity.Gary Foster - 2011 - Philosophical Psychology 24 (6):825 - 844.
    In this paper I address a Euthyphro problem associated with personal love. Do we love someone because we have reasons for loving that person or do we have reasons for loving that person because we love her? I argue that a relational view of identity will help us move some distance towards resolving this dilemma. But the relational view itself needs to be further supplemented by examining the role that imagination plays both in personal identity and in our experience of (...)
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  • ?Only in the contemplation of beauty is human life worth living? Plato, symposium 211d.Alexander Nehamas - 2007 - European Journal of Philosophy 15 (1):1–18.
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  • Love's realism: Iris Murdoch and the importance of being human.Lesley Jamieson - forthcoming - European Journal of Philosophy.
    Defenders of two Rationality Views of love—the Qualities View and the Personhood View—have drawn on Iris Murdoch's philosophical writings to highlight a connection between love and a “realistic” perspective on the beloved. Murdoch does not inform the basic structure of these views—she is rather introduced as a supplement who shows that in love, we pay accurate, nuanced, unguarded, and unflinching attention to the other. In this paper, I contend that these authors have failed to see that Murdoch offers a distinct (...)
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  • What Virtue Adds to Value.Glen Pettigrove - 2022 - Australasian Philosophical Review 6 (2):113-128.
    ABSTRACT In virtually every corner of ethics—including discussions of value, practical reasoning, moral psychology, and justice—it is common for theorists to suggest that our actions, attitudes, or emotions should be proportional to the degree of value present in the objects or events to which they are responding. I argue that there is a fundamental problem with these approaches: they overlook the character of the agent and what it adds to the equation. I show that a commitment to proportionality is at (...)
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  • Love and Fission.Ben Blumson & Jeremiah Joven Joaquin - manuscript
    According to a traditional conception, romantic love is both constant - if someone loves another, they continue to love them - and exclusive - if someone loves another, they love only the other. In this paper, we argue that the essentiality of constancy and exclusivity is incompatible with the possibilities of fission - roughly speaking, of one person becoming two - and fusion - roughly speaking, of two people becoming one. Moreover, if fission or fusion are possible, then constancy and (...)
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  • Holding on to Reasons of the Heart: Cognitive Deterioration and the Capacity to Love".Andrew Franklin-Hall & Agnieszka Jaworska - 2016 - In Katrien Schaubroeck & Esther Kroeker (eds.), Love, Reason and Morality. New York: Routledge. pp. 20-38.
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  • Fans, Crimes and Misdemeanors: Fandom and the Ethics of Love.Alfred Archer - 2021 - The Journal of Ethics 25 (4):543-566.
    Is it permissible to be a fan of an artist or a sports team that has behaved immorally? While this issue has recently been the subject of widespread public debate, it has received little attention in the philosophical literature. This paper will investigate this issue by examining the nature and ethics of fandom. I will argue that the crimes and misdemeanors of the object of fandom provide three kinds of moral reasons for fans to abandon their fandom. First, being a (...)
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  • The Amorality of Romantic Love.Arina Pismenny - 2021 - In Rachel Fedock, Michael Kühler & T. Raja Rosenhagen (eds.), Love, Justice, and Autonomy: Philosophical Perspectives. Routledge. pp. 23-42.
    It has been argued that romantic love is an intrinsically moral phenomenon – a phenomenon that is directly connected to morality. The connection is elucidated in terms of reasons for love, and reasons of love. It is said that romantic love is a response to moral reasons – the moral qualities of the beloved. Additionally, the reasons that love produces are also moral in nature. Since romantic love is a response to moral qualities and a source of moral motivation, it (...)
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  • Lost without you: the Value of Falling out of Love.Pilar Lopez-Cantero & Alfred Archer - 2020 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (3-4):1-15.
    In this paper we develop a view about the disorientation attached to the process of falling out of love and explain its prudential and moral value. We start with a brief background on theories of love and situate our argument within the views concerned with the lovers’ identities. Namely, love changes who we are. In the context of our paper, we explain this common tenet in the philosophy of love as a change in the lovers’ self-concepts through a process of (...)
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  • Is Racial Profiling More Benign in Medicine Than Law Enforcement?David Wasserman - 2011 - The Journal of Ethics 15 (1-2):119 - 129.
    It might seem that racial profiling by doctors raised few of the same concerns as racial profiling by police, immigration, or airport security. This paper argues that the similarities are greater than first appear. The inappropriate use of racial generalizations by doctors may be as harmful and insulting as their use by law enforcement officials. Indeed, the former may be more problematic in compromising an ideal of individualized treatment that is more applicable to doctors than to police. Yet doctors, unlike (...)
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  • Subject-centred reasons and bestowal love.Dwayne Moore - 2019 - Philosophical Explorations 22 (1):62-77.
    Speaking roughly, there are two competing accounts of the basis of love. First, the appraisal view: love is based in reasons derived from the valuable properties of the beloved. Second, the bestowal view: love is not based in reasons derived from the valuable properties of the beloved, but love is based in the lover, who then bestows value onto the beloved. While both models deserve due attention, the bestowal model is of present concern. Despite numerous virtues, the bestowal model faces (...)
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  • Reconciling Appraisal Love and Bestowal Love.Dwayne Moore - 2018 - Dialogue 57 (1):67-92.
    Le modèle évaluatif de l’amour est centré sur l’objet et basé sur les raisons : l’amour se fonde sur des raisons dérivées des propriétés appréciables de l’aimé. Le modèle attributif de l’amour est axé sur le sujet et non fondé sur les raisons : l’amour n’est pas basé sur des raisons dérivées des propriétés appréciables de l’aimé, mais provient plutôt de l’amant. Dans cet article, je mélange ces modèles opposés dans le but de préserver leurs vertus et de surmonter leurs (...)
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  • The Power to Make Others Worship.Aaron Smuts - 2012 - Religious Studies 48 (2):221 - 237.
    Can any being worthy of worship make others worship it? I think not. By way of an analogy to love, I argue that it is perfectly coherent to think that one could be made to worship. However, forcing someone to worship violates their autonomy, not because worship must be freely given, but because forced worship would be inauthentic—much like love earned through potions. For this reason, I argue that one cannot be made to worship properly; forced worship would be unfitting. (...)
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  • Against Strong Cognitivism: An Argument from the Particularity of Love.Hilla Jacobson - 2014 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 92 (3):563-596.
    According to the view we may term “strong cognitivism”, all reasons for action are rooted in normative features that the motivated subject takes objects to have independently of her attitudes towards these objects. The main concern of this paper is to argue against strong cognitivism, that is, to establish the view that conative attitudes do provide subjects with reasons for action. The central argument to this effect is a top-down argument: it proceeds by an analysis of the complex phenomenon of (...)
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  • The Monogamous Conception of Romantic Love and Western Critiques of Polygamy in African Traditions.Polycarp Ikuenobe - 2018 - Philosophical Papers 47 (3):373-401.
    I critically examine how, from a Western cultural perspective of romantic love and Judeo-Christian tradition, certain liberal cultural values and prejudices are used presumptuously to criticize polygamy in African traditions. These criticisms assume, circularly, the superiority of Western cultural monogamous values over African cultural traditional practice of polygamy. I argue that these arguments are specious and particularly unreasonable from an intercultural philosophical perspective. A plausible liberal justification for Western legal imposition of monogamy is to prevent harm. I argue that if (...)
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  • The folk metaphysics of love.Ulrika Carlsson - 2018 - European Journal of Philosophy 26 (4):1398-1409.
    I argue against the intellectualist view of love according to which we (must) love for reasons so that love is rational. Engaging primarily with the quality appraisal view of love, I concede that qualities can cause love but insist that it is misguided to think of love as having reasons. A number of features of human psychology complicate the issue of how lover relates to beloved's qualities. (a) The lover may be attracted to a quality without appraising that quality reflectively. (...)
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