Love’s Exemplars: A Response to Gupta, Earp, and Savulescu

Abstract

Love’s ExemplarsA Response to Gupta, Earp, and Savulescu Andrew McGee (bio) I am grateful to Brian Earp, Julian Savulescu, and Kristina Gupta for their thoughtful remarks on my paper. I cannot answer all of their points here, but select what I consider to be the most important. Gupta believes that I commit myself to “a common sense” account of love. This is not so. “Common sense” refers to beliefs, not concepts. Concepts can be used to express true, false, and diametrically opposed beliefs, so are not themselves beliefs; rather, they are the logical precondition for holding beliefs. When I say, “red is a color,” I am not advocating on behalf of common sense, still less making a claim held by any “dominant social group.” Suppose Gupta disagrees and says, “The red-green color-blind do not regard red as a color.” But this is only to say that they do not share the concept of red, which is a precondition to disagreement about the use of the concept (say, whether a rose is red or not). The same point applies in the case of the concept of love. This does not mean that people cannot, sometimes, disagree about how far a concept extends. Again, such disagreement presupposes an understanding of those instances of a concept about which there is no dispute (what I called its exemplars). It is not clear why Gupta thinks my arguments imply that embroidery is not an exemplar of art, nor why she thinks that I only count heterosexual love as love. Readers will search in vain for anything to that effect in my paper. Gupta wisely does not deny that there are exemplars about which people are not in dispute. Imagine if people disagreed about whether any exemplars of red were really red. How could we even have the concept of red in such a case? We need to know what counts as red to have a disagreement about whether a particular shade is red or not. Similarly, we may disagree about how far the concept of a game extends, but someone who doubted that Scrabble is a game is not being admirably open-minded. Adding that it is only a game for the “dominant social group” can only mean it is not a game in other social groups, not that it does not count as a game in any social group. Related remarks apply to Earp and Savulescu’s claim that their own preference is to remain “relatively agnostic” about what love “really is.” How far should we take this agnosticism? Should we equally remain agnostic about what fear is? What a smile is? Should we be more qualified when we teach these concepts to our children? It makes sense to be agnostic about what dark matter is, but not what love is. Gupta makes much of my throwaway phrase, “love properly so-called.” The context for my using that phrase should be borne in mind. For example, my remark was made to rebut the common but mistaken view that love is an appetite. Love, unlike lust, is not an appetite, but an affection, because love can take a specific object whereas appetites take formal objects, and love [End Page 101] does not cease even when I am with the beloved whereas hunger ceases once I have eaten (Bennett & Hacker, 2003). A person’s fetish for cow manure is not a fetish for this particular piece of cow dung, but for cow dung as such, whereas someone’s love for a person is for this person (a point that, as Earp and Savulescu note, does not commit me to seeing love as only monogamous). Any manure will do, whereas you cannot console a person who loses their partner in a car crash by saying, “It’s OK, there are plenty more fish in the sea!” I agree with Earp and Savulescu that we need to be careful about the value-laden use of some distinctions, such as the ‘healthy’ ‘unhealthy’ distinction. But that does not mean we cannot use these concepts at all (as they concede). It is easy to over-intellectualize. Suppose Gupta, Earp, and Savulescu invite a best friend out...