Topics Love

Question The best, general definition of love I've come up with is: one's willingness to do what one truly considers best for another without regard for personal desires. There are 2 things I should point out: 1) by "willingness to do" I mean that which will be done unless impossible or prevented by something external -- if I am willing to do X and X is possible then I will do X unless something or someone prevents me from doing it. 2) I say "truly considers best" to draw a distinction between the lazy "this is what I was told is best" or "I don't really know but I think this is best" and the more difficult "best" that is determined by effort, honesty, study, research, etc. Likewise, I disallow a "best" determined according to what the lover desires, or wants. Is this a good (accurate, useful) definition?

Accepted:
November 30, 2005

Comments

I don't know, I suppose in any case it depends on whether you think definitions are useful or not. I am not convinced they are very helpful. But take this scenario well known to us from romantic novels and soap operas: one person loves another but thinks that it is not in the interest of either party for the relationship to continue. According to your definition the obvious conclusion would be to break off the relationship, since it is not in the interests of the person loved, or even the lover. But if this was the conclusion actually drawn, then many of our personal relationships would come to an end in what many would describe as a premature way. Love seems to me to have a much wider scope than your definition, but then, that is a problem with definitions as a whole.

I think this is a plausible statement (and it is stated very well, obviously--are you a philosopher already?) of at least a necessary condition of love. But it is beset with troubles. One is that it putting it into practice may be paternalistic and in some ways will involve denying the autonomy of the beloved. (And to the extent that acting paternalistically toward the beloved and denying or overriding the beloved's autonomy is incompatible with love, we would have to reject it as an account of love.) For what if your best judgment of what is good for the beloved conflicts with what the beloved has decided (say, also a best judgment) is good for the beloved. Then since or if there is no "external" constraint on your behavior (unless you include your beloved's contrary decision, but that is not what you had in mind by "prevented"), you will have to do for your beloved something your beloved has rejected as not being for the beloved's good. That is paternalism (fine as an expression of love for kids, but not for adults); it also overrides the beloved's autonomy. One could reply here that your best judgment of what is good for the beloved will be influenced by what the beloved thinks, by his or her own best judgment, is good for the beloved (although you didn't include that explicitly in your list of factors involved in reaching your best judgment). But if you make that move, the account seems to lose interest: of course, if I love Y, I will discuss with him or her what she thinks is good for him or her in my deciding what I should do for her qua doing the good for her. Here we have a branching of accounts. One account: I rely on what my beloved says and thinks in arriving at my best judgment of what is good for him or her, and then I do for my beloved what I have decided is good because that is what I have decided is good for my beloved. (I took my beloved's view into account; but it is my independent view that determined what I did.) On the second account the "because" is different: I do for my beloved what we have worked out is best for my beloved because we have worked out the decision together. Some would claim that the latter is more accurately a necessry condition of love. Indeed, in contrast to the account proposed in the question, some philosophers have claimed that if X loves Y, then X the lover will (try to or be willing to) do for Y precisely and only what Y the beloved thinks is good for Y. This account of love takes the incompatibility of love with paternalism/loss of autonomy seriously. Perhaps it is an extreme on the other side, and just as wrong as the view proposed in the question. Maybe this explains why some philosophers have embraced the following account: when X and Y love each other there is no such thing left as X's view of what is good for Y and Y's view of what is good for X. Such independent perspectives (including "best" judgments) drop out, and all that exists is the joint/unified X-Y view of what is good for the joint/unified item X-Y. (This is not the same as the second alternative I mentioned above, which did not talk about "unification.") Mark Fisher's book on love (Personal Love) contains this sort of account. I find it mysterious, which is a nice way of saying that I find it silly. By the way, I discuss Fisher (and Oliver Leaman's specific example) at length in my "Union, Autonomy, and Concern," published in Roger Lamb's collection Love Analyzed. When my web site at UNO is restored, you can get it at http://fs.uno.edu/asoble/pages/union.htm (take a look, questioner).