You should summarize the main claims of each theory, and give reasons for your opinions and beliefs about them. Cite any sources you use, except what is listed below. Length Requirement: 500 words. Do you always need a reason for loving someone? Or is it rather that loving someone does not require a reason at all? Much has been argued for each of these views, as well as for intermediate positions. A popular view states that love is not the sort of thing that can be assessed for rationality. Another popular view is that love is essentially an irrational phenomenon. In this part of the course we will discuss some of the main reasons that have made people endorse these positions. We will also introduce our main reasons for our preferred view, namely, that love can be both rational and irrational. These materials should give you sufficient elements to start shaping your own position on this debate. For the view that love cannot meaningfully be said to be rational or irrational, we consider the line of thought of philosopher Laurence Thomas. Thomas claims that there is no irrationality involved in ceasing to love a person whom one once loved immensely, although that person has not changed. He wants to defend the view that there is nothing morally impermissible in ceasing to love your significant other. That is to say, you have no moral obligation to stay with somebody you dont love anymore, regardless of how wonderful he or she is. We agree with Thomas on this. However, we think that a flaw in his argument is that he wrongly thinks that reasons for loving engender an obligation to love. This is not the case. Reasons for loving only render love permissible. On the other hand, philosopher J. David Velleman holds that each human being possesses an intrinsic value, which is not different from the intrinsic value possessed by others, and in virtue of which we are all equally deserving of love. Call this the transcendent view of love. On the transcendent view, love is awareness of the value of the other. A consequence of this view is the extreme view that love is always rational: all cases of love are justified because everyone is equally lovable. Hence, your significant other, Mother Theresa and Charles Manson are equally deserving of your love; same thing goes for your annoying neighbor or for that lovely lady at the supermarket. Why, then, do you love your significant other instead of any of these individuals? This is a potential problem for the transcendent view. You can see in the book and in the article assigned for this module what Vellemans response is. Think about whether this answer is convincing. A different, less extreme view is held by philosopher Nico Kolodny. Kolodny believes that love is justified (and hence, rational) in all and only those cases in which there is a pre-existing history of shared experiences. According to this view, love is rational sometimes and irrational some other times, depending on the presence or absence of such a history. Although Kolodnys view might sound intuitive, it is not without problems. For instance, the view as it stands does not specify what kind of history is required to render love rational. Further elaboration of this difficulty is discussed in the book. You should think of ways in which Kolodnys view could be improved. What kind of histories are appropriate in order to say that your love for someone is rational? Is there are kind of history of shared experiences that would make your loving someone irrational? Why? The view that love can be rational when the appropriate conditions are met, that is, the view that there can be good reasons for loving, seems in conflict with another deeply entrenched belief about love, namely, the belief that love ought to be unconditional. We say that love is conditional when it is contingent upon certain circumstances; for instance, the antagonist of a soap opera claims to love the hero of the story so long as he keeps her living in a nice house. Once the condition is gone, her love is gone as well. Conditional love is straightforward enough to illustrate and identify. However, it is easy to conflate unconditional love with loving no matter what. We think that the apparent conflict between the claim that there can be good reasons for loving and the claim that love ought to be unconditional arises from this conflation. Hence, we want to draw a clear distinction between these two ways of loving. When you love unconditionally, you are not specifying, and could not specify up front under what conditions you will love or cease to love a person. But there may nonetheless still be circumstances that could put an end to it; think, for instance, whether you could still love your significant other if he or she started beating you with a stick! Thus, we think that you can love someone unconditionally, without loving him or her no matter what. Moreover, it is perfectly rational to love someone unconditionally on this definition of unconditionality; while it is certainly irrational to love someone no matter what (think, again, of the beating up with a stick!).
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