How might emerging and future technologies—sex robots, love drugs, anti-love drugs, or algorithms to track, quantify, and ‘gamify’ romantic relationships—change how we understand and value love? We canvass some of the main ethical worries posed by such technologies, while also considering whether there are reasons for “cautious optimism” about their implications for our lives. Along the way, we touch on some key ideas from the philosophies of love and technology.

Brian Earp’s and Julian Savulescu’s provocatively titled “Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships” is a philosophically rigorous, scientifically informed, and yet wholly accessible study o...

Philip Pettit has identified some interesting apparent commonalities among core human values like love, friendship, virtue, and respect. These are all, Pettit argues, ‘robustly demanding’: they require us to provide certain benefits across ranges of alternative scenarios. Pettit also suggests a general ‘rationale’ for valuing such goods, which draws on his work on freedom. In this paper, I zoom in on love in particular. I critically assess whether Pettit’s schematic account of love’s value adequately captures what we typically value in (...) valuing love. And I scrutinize the analogy Pettit suggests between the rationale for valuing freedom and his rationale for valuing love. My conclusion is that whereas Pettit’s account of love and its value does not strictly speaking contain false propositions, it ends up being a somewhat skewed account of love’s value. Finally, I bring up some widely discussed aspects of love’s value not captured by Pettit’s account. (shrink)

Three claims about love and justice cannot be simultaneously true and therefore entail a paradox: (1) Love is a matter of justice. (2) There cannot be a duty to love. (3) All matters of justice are matters of duty. The first claim is more controversial. To defend it, I show why the extent to which we enjoy the good of love is relevant to distributive justice. To defend (2) I explain the empirical, conceptual and axiological arguments in its favour. Although (...) (3) is the most generally endorsed claim of the three, I conclude we should reject it in order to avoid the paradox. (shrink)

In my contribution to this book symposium on Emma Gordon’s book Human Enhancement and Well-Being, I discuss and respond to Gordon’s extensive discussion and criticisms of a skeptical argument regarding the desirability of love enhancements that I presented in a 2015 paper. I start by first explaining the overall project of Gordon’s book, make a general comment about her overall approach (which I am broadly sympathetic with), and then proceed to a detailed discussion of Gordon’s critical engagement with my 2015 (...) argument. I defend my argument against Gordon’s interesting criticisms and argue that Gordon has not defused my skeptical challenge to the desirability of love enhancements, but I also end by identifying key points of agreement between me and Gordon. Specific topics discussed include the distinction between ways of loving and causes of loving, the value of ways of loving and the value of the causes of loving, and whether or not the ideal of robust love attachments can be seen as compatible attachments causally dependent on love enhancements. (shrink)

New technologies regularly bring about profound changes in our daily lives. Romantic relationships are no exception to these transformations. Some philosophers expect the emergence in the near future of love drugs: a theoretically achievable biotechnological intervention that could be designed to strengthen and maintain love in romantic relationships. We investigated laypeople’s resistance to the use of such technologies and its sources. Across two studies (Study 1, French and Peruvian university students, N after exclusion = 186; Study 2, Amazon Mechanical Turk (...) sample, N after exclusion = 693, pre-registered), we found that the use of love drugs designed to strengthen and maintain love in romantic relationships are considered as more morally problematic than psychological therapy with the same aim. In Study 2, we show that this last effect is partially due to the fact that the love resulting from the use of love drugs is perceived as less authentic, intense, and durable. We discuss the specific role of authenticity in the relative moral disapproval of love drugs. (shrink)