Wedding vows seem to be promises. So they go: I promise to love, honour, and cherish .... But this poses a problem. Divorce is not widely seen as a serious moral wrong, but breaking a promise is. I first consider, and defend against preliminary objections, a ‘hard-line’ response: divorce is indeed prima facie impermissible promise-breaking. I next consider the ‘hardship’ response—the hardship of failed marriages overrides the prima facie duty to keep promises. However, this would release promisors in far too (...) many cases. I resolve the triad by considering the content of the vows. Vows concerning love are not promises at all. We cannot promise to do acts the performance of which is outside our control, and love involves states of mind outside our control. Vows concerning spousal roles are complicated by diverse social understandings of marriage and the centrality of emotion to the roles. (shrink)

This paper asks three inter-related questions, proceeding chronologically through a divorcee’s experience: is it responsible and rational to make an unconditional marital vow in the first place? does divorce break that unconditional marital vow? And the main question: can the divorcee make a second unconditional marital vow in all moral seriousness? To the last question I answer yes. I argue that the divorce process is so disorienting – to use Amy Harbin’s term – as to transform the divorcee and therefore (...) partly release her from the original vow. Arguing this will require a specific understanding of personal identity and change. (shrink)

This paper asks three inter-related questions, proceeding chronologically through a divorcee’s experience: is it responsible and rational to make an unconditional marital vow in the first place? does divorce break that unconditional marital vow? And the main question: can the divorcee make a second unconditional marital vow in all moral seriousness? To the last question I answer yes. I argue that the divorce process is so disorienting – to use Amy Harbin’s term – as to transform the divorcee and therefore (...) partly release her from the original vow. Arguing this will require a specific understanding of personal identity and change. (shrink)

This paper asks three inter-related questions, proceeding chronologically through a divorcee’s experience: is it responsible and rational to make an unconditional marital vow in the first place? does divorce break that unconditional marital vow? And the main question: can the divorcee make a second unconditional marital vow in all moral seriousness? To the last question I answer yes. I argue that the divorce process is so disorienting – to use Amy Harbin’s term – as to transform the divorcee and therefore (...) partly release her from the original vow. Arguing this will require a specific understanding of personal identity and change. (shrink)

“I am only what I make myself to be”, Fichte tells us. In this paper, I outline Fichte’s views on sex, marriage and gender, with two aims. Firstly, to elucidate an aspect of his moral theory which has received little attention, and secondly to argue that Fichte’s distinctive stance on selfhood, freedom, and normativity lead to a revisionary account of gender expression and identity, where people can freely carve out their own identity, irrespective of “nature”. In this paper, I therefore (...) outline Fichte’s own views, highlighting what I see as a tension in the texts between essentialism and antiessentialism about gender, before reconstructing a neo-Fichtean view which foregrounds the anti-essentialist aspect. (shrink)

‘Marital faithfulness’ refers to faithful love for a spouse or lover to whom one is committed, rather than the narrower idea of sexual fidelity. The distinction is clearly marked in traditional wedding vows. A commitment to love faithfully is central: ‘to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part… and thereto I plight [pledge] thee my troth [faithfulness]’. (...) Sexual fidelity is promised in a subordinate clause, symbolizing its supportive role in promoting love's constancy: ‘and, forsaking all other, keep thee only unto her/him.’. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research is currently published by International Phenomenological Society.

People often say that romantic love should be unconditional, and they often want romantic love to last forever. These claims and desires are presumably linked: part of the reason it would be good for love to be unconditional is that it is assumed that such love, being detached from changing conditions, would last forever. This article argues that there are, indeed, kinds of unconditional and permanent love that are worth wanting, but also kinds that are not, and attempts to clarify (...) just what it is that is valuable about these kinds of romantic love. (shrink)

The ancient philosophers aimed to turn us away from thinking about particularizing affection to thinking about justifiable human relations. The aim of their protreptic discourses was to get their readers, who were citizens, sons, and fathers, to think about their lives by putting these relations into question. I show how this conversion works and explore its political consequences by reading the accounts of friendship in Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, and then comparing those accounts with the views on the causes and (...) justifications of human relations of Rousseau, of Christians and post-Christian Kantians, and of the Hebrew Bible and its Rabbinic commentators. (shrink)

Abstract What sense are we to make of the promise of love against the contingency of human life? I discuss two replies to this question: (1) the suggestion that marriage, based on the probable success of this kind of relationship, is a more or less worthwhile endeavour (cf. Moller and Landau), and (2) Martha Nussbaum's Aristotelian proposal that we only live life fully if we embrace aspects of life, such as loving relationships, that are vulnerable to fortune. I show that (...) both responses, in different ways, depend on the presupposition that the sense of our promises to love is dependent on our ability to make predictions. The philosophers I discuss assume an epistemological standpoint from which we may attempt to judge whether it is in our general interest to love. I argue that embracing such a perspective by itself leads our attention away from the kind of personal and moral engagement in other people of which our promises to love are expressive. From the perspective of love, the attempt to calculate the risks and gains of loving itself appears as a moral failure to be present to the reality of other people. (shrink)