Love and Moral Structures

Abstract

This entry sketches ways in which placing love at morality’s center—where love is conceived as various forms of good will—can point the way to a number of attractive and new (or neglected) options for moral theorists. These include treating virtues as internal and basic to both duty and value; relativizing all our moral virtues, obligations, and so on, to certain role-relationships we fill in persons’ lives; focusing on actions’ and attitudes’ “patients” (understood as the people to whom anyone’s occupying such relationships connects); and morally categorizing actions, including whether they are obligatory, forbidden, or merely permitted on the grounds of their agents’ motivations rather than the actions’ results. Such virtues basing, as we can call it, offers an appealing alternative to seeing either duty or the valuable as conceptually basic, and, indeed, regarding love as the form of our major moral virtues helps answer enduring questions about how to analyze each of them. Similarly, love is always of someone, the beloved (object of love) and, when theorists focus on these patients of loving actions, seeing the action’s licitness as its lovingness to that Other within the role, they can recognize the real determinants of moral status not in self-interest, nor in optimization of the world condition, but in the agent’s resolve to act helpfully. Likewise, as virtues, the various forms of love such as truthfulness (that is, willing one’s auditor the good of true belief) or respect (i.e., willing someone such goods of personhood as self-governance) are features having which tends to make the loving person good within one or more of her relevant role-relationships: a good friend, for instance, or good as a spouse, or simply a good “neighbor” in the Christians’ sense. That suggests a relational conception of moral life wherein any virtue or vice or duty that someone has is one that she has in some person-to-person role. In addition, whether an action, or emotional reaction, is loving is shaped by what is the moral subject’s and agent’s mind; such an input-driven account of actions’ morality stands against any even partially consequence-dependent account of moral right and wrong. These options involve moral structures in either the sense that they reveal the logical structure of an important kind of moral judgment, or the sense that they disclose which, among the moral concepts and judgments, stand as fundamental and which derive from those bases.