Reasons Of Love Research Articles

Psychological Perspective of Mother-Daughter Relationship in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Toni Morrison delves deeply into history, culture, and human psychology in her novels, which go well beyond surface dynamics to examine the mother-daughter bond in great detail. Morrison's writing expertly explores the psychological elements that shape and define the relationship between mothers and daughters while also illuminating the bond between them through the careful weaving together of intricate events. Morrison focuses his examination on the idea of identity. She examines how women negotiate their identities in the face of family expectations, societal norms, and personal aspirations. Through the lives of her characters, Morrison illustrates the inner struggles that women experience as they attempt to strike a balance between the weight of their ancestors' past and their demand for personal liberty. Morrison uses parallelism between Beloved and Sethe frequently enough to make it hard for the reader to ignore their affection for one another and their mental relationship, which is, regrettably, the source of their conflict as mother and daughter. A further sign that the two do not understand each other's reasons for love and desertion is the difference between Beloved's recall that Sethe "left her" and Sethe's reminder to her that she "loves her."

Revising the Puzzle of Negligence: Transforming the Citizen towards Civic Maturity

Abstract Corrective justice theorists tell us that to resort to features or characteristics alien to the internal structure of corrective justice and the law of negligence undermines the intelligibility of the phenomena, i.e., the interaction between the plaintiff and the defendant. Like friendship or love which can only be understood by reasons of love or friendship itself, the doctrinal aspects of negligence law can only be correctly understood and become intelligible within the normativity, internal logic and reasons of corrective justice, i.e., equality between persons, autonomy. Furthermore, law and juridical thinking are a matter of rights and duties. By contrast, ethical deliberation and practical reason are a matter of virtuous action, values and what is good. The first underlying presupposition will be called the “internal logic” thesis. The latter will be called the “the separation of rights and values” thesis. I aim to debunk both theses and argue, first, that we need to grasp the values embedded in the law in our “doing” and in our engagement with the law. This does not mean that these values are external and therefore that we make the internal logic of negligence law unintelligible. I will show that from the forward-looking perspective of the citizen there is no stark separation of rights and values. When engaging in decisions judges attribute liability grounded on the plaintiff’s rights and defendant’s duties, they take the backward-looking standpoint. However, in negligence law, judges advance values that play the role of proleptic thoughts, i.e., descriptions and re-descriptions of values, in the practical reasoning of the citizens. We can understand both functions or roles because we can understand that there is no stark separation of rights/duties and values. Finally, the paper considers whether my position sheds light on the role of moral luck in negligence law.

Is Practical Deliberation Bound by a Coherency Requirement? Foundational Normative States, Volitional Conflict, and Autonomy

AbstractHarry G. Frankfurt has put the problem of volitional conflict at the center of philosophical attention. If you care fundamentally about your career and your family, but these cares conflict, this conflict undermines the coherency of your decision standard and thereby your ability to choose and act autonomously. The standard response to this problem is to argue that you can overcome volitional conflict by unifying your foundational motivational states. As Frankfurt puts it, the ‘totality of things that an agent cares about’ plus his ‘ordering of how important to him they are effectively specifies his answer to the question of how to live’ (The Reasons of Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 23). In this paper, I critically assess the three main reasons given for such a coherency requirement: 1) we can do only one action at a time; 2) our motivational states come with normative pressure towards coherency; and 3) conflicting motivational states provide us with an incoherent decision-making framework. I conclude that these reasons do not ground a coherency requirement for practical deliberation and argue that we can autonomously express ourselves as volitionally conflicted by acting on our conflicting motivational states over the course of multiple actions.

Humanity as an object of attachment

ABSTRACT In Why Worry about Future Generations?, Samuel Scheffler argues that we typically love humanity, and that this attachment gives us reasons to care about future generations. The paper explores this idea with an eye to understanding better the sense in which humanity is an object of attachment. The paper argues that the humanity we love should be understood in an enriched rather than a reductively biological sense, as a species that has historically sustained a complex set of cultural and personal meanings. Caring about this object will lead us to be concerned about future generations. But these reasons of love should not be understood as reasons to be concerned directly about the fate of individual future people. The paper concludes with some reflections about the attachment-independent value of humanity in the enriched sense, distinguishing between relational and non-relational interpretations of this independent value.

A Fresh Look at ‘Relational’ Values in Nature: Distinctions Derived from the Debate on Meaningfulness in Life

Some recent policy-oriented publications have put forward a third category of environmental values, namely relational or eudaimonic values, in addition to intrinsic and instrumental values. In this debate, there is, however, much confusion about the content of such values. This paper looks at a fundamental debate in ethics about a third category of reasons besides reasons from morality and self-interest, labelled as reasons of love, care or meaningfulness. This category allows us, first, to see the relation between relational and eudaimonic values, and, second, to make clear and applicable distinctions between the relational valuing of nature and moral or instrumental valuing.

Love, Reasons, and Desire

This essay defends subjectivism about reasons of love. These are the normative reasons we have to treat those we love especially well, such as the reasons we have to treat our close friends or life partners better than strangers. Subjectivism about reasons of love is the view that every reason of love a person has is correctly explained by her desires. I formulate a version of subjectivism about reasons of love and defend it against three objections that have been made to this kind of view. Firstly, it has been argued that the phenomenology of our focus when we have reasons of love does not fit with subjectivism about those reasons. Secondly, it has been argued that the phenomenology of our motivations when we have reasons of love does not fit with subjectivism about those reasons. Thirdly, it has been argued that subjectivism about reasons of love has deeply counterintuitive implications about what our reasons of love are. I argue that none of these objections succeeds.

A Study on the Literary Characteristics of Gojug Choegyeongchang’s Han-si

A Study on the Literary Characteristics of Gojug Choegyeongchang’s Han-si

Do We Love For Reasons?

Do we love for reasons? It can seem as if we do, since most cases of non‐familial love seem selective: coming to love a non‐family‐member often begins with our being drawn to them for what they are like. I argue, however, that we can vindicate love's selectivity, even if we maintain that there are no reasons for love; indeed, that gives us a simpler, and hence better, explanation of love's selectivity. We don't, in short, come to love for reasons. That which seemed like evidence for thinking that there are reasons for love, then, turns out to militate against that view how can these purported reasons be reasons for love, if they don't engender (in virtue of rationalizing) it?

Reasons of love and moral thinking

There are two widely-held intuitions about morality. One is the claim that all persons have equal moral worth; the other is that sometimes we are morally allowed or even required to give preference to those individuals whom we love. How can we justify our reasons of love in the face of moral egalitarianism? as of recently, there are three mutually competing accounts of why it could be said that we have reasons of love: (i) the projects view, (ii) the relationship view, and (iii) the individuals view. In this paper, I first examine these three views and find fault with each of them as they stand. I then proceed to propose a complex, yet a more compelling, account of reasons of love that builds on the individuals view.

Procreative-parenting, love's reasons and the demands of morality

Many philosophers believe that the relationship between a parent and a child is valuable, but few believe that this has anything to do with procreation. However, if it is indeed true that procreation adds no value to the activity of parenting, then it is hard to see how procreative-parenting can overcome two particularly pressing philosophical challenges. The first challenge is to show that it is morally permissible for prospective parents to procreate given that adoption takes us much closer to both environmental and social justice. The second challenge is to show that it is morally permissible for biological parents to parent their biological child when other prospective parents are willing and able to do a much better job at furthering the child's interests. In this essay, I provide an account of the value of procreative-parenting that can resist these two challenges.

Thinking About a Word—Love, for Example

AbstractWhat is it we do when we philosophize about a word? How are we to act as we ask the philosophical question par excellence, “What is … ?” These questions are addressed here with particular focus on Troy Jollimore's Love's Vision and contemporary theories of love. Jollimore's rationalist account of love, based on a specific understanding of “reasons for love,” illustrates a particular philosophical mistake: When we think about a word, we are prone to believe that even though “the sense of the word” that we investigate may be up for grabs, the other words we use when we do these investigations are not. Jollimore's exploration of love is guided by specific conceptions of “reasons” and “rationality” that remain unquestioned. The article argues that we may have to rethink a great number of words as we embark on the task of uncovering the sense of one word.

In Defense of Trait‐Based Love

AbstractIt is widely believed that a person's traits can function as reasons for loving her. (Many a metropolitan rag, for instance, carries lonely hearts ads that attest to this belief with their laundry lists of coveted characteristics.) Notable contemporary work in the philosophy of love has taken the rejection of this premise as its point of departure. As far as I can tell, none of that work has engaged with a careful philosophical exposition of the view under discussion. In the following pages, I will defend the idea of trait‐based love against three of its critics and one of its advocates. I will discuss work on this topic by Harry Frankfurt, Niko Kolodny and David Velleman, arguing that their criticisms fail and that the alternatives they offer to trait‐based love create more difficulties than they solve. What these authors have in common is a deflationary approach to love that reduces it to a beneficent disposition, a valuing relationship and a visceral form of moral regard, respectively. I will compare these to the multiplex, nuanced depiction of trait‐based love in Plato's Symposium. While it is plausible that love can motivate a beneficent disposition, develop in relationships and entails moral regard, I will argue that the attempt to reduce it to any of the foregoing fails. Frankfurt, Kolodny and Velleman reject trait‐based love in part because they think it would differ in unacceptable ways from the love most of us practice. Plato advocates the cultivation of a love that in some respects resembles the picture of trait‐based love the contemporary authors balk at. However, unlike those critics, he appreciates that trait‐based love need not resemble the ideal he proposes. His richer view of love accounts for elements such as need and feeling that the contemporary thinkers are driven to implausibly bracket as distractions. As I will try to show, the most compelling criticisms of Platonic love do not tell against its responsiveness to the loved one's traits. I will argue that trait‐based love is consistent with an intuitive picture of love and that this commonsense approach is more defensible than competing views in these texts. These authors' disagreements about what can count as reasons for love are bound up with the differences in what each takes love to be. Thus, in the course of arguing for trait‐based love, I will critically assess their various proposals as to the nature of love.

Reasons of Love: a Case against Universalism about Practical Reason

The paper presents an argument from love against universalism about practical reason, that is, the view that an agent's practical reasons normatively supervene on the agent's circumstances. Universalism explains the different reasons you and I have by citing differences in our properties, circumstances, relationships, etc. It thus rejects the possibility that the normative differences between us are basic. But love seems to make such basic distinctions, for it gives us special reasons with regard to particular individuals as such. To establish this, I criticize Niko Kolodny's relationship theory, which accounts for reasons of love in universal terms. Then I suggest that any universalist account will fail in the same way.

Loving Someone in Particular

AbstractPeople loved for their beauty and cheerfulness are not loved as irreplaceable, yet people loved for “what their souls are made of” are. Or so literary romance implies; leading philosophical accounts, however, deny the distinction, holding that reasons for love either do not exist or do not include the beloved’s distinguishing features. In this, I argue, they deny an essential species of love. To account for it while preserving the beloved’s irreplaceability, I defend a model of agency on which people can love each other for identities still being created, through a kind of mutual improvisation.

Meaning in Life: Meeting the Challenges

Responding to comments by Cheshire Calhoun and Arnold Burms, this piece clarifies some of Wolf’s ideas about the relation between meaningfulness in life, on the one hand, and reasons of love, fulfillment, and objective value, on the other. Meaning tends to come from activities whose reasons are grounded in love of a worthy (objectively valuable) object, and not necessarily from reasons having anything to do with an interest in meaningfulness itself. But what counts as a worthy object cannot be determined either from a totally neutral and impersonal point of view or from the points of view of specific other people who matter to the subject.

Reasons of Love: Response to Wolf

According to Wolf’s fitting fulfillment view, meaningfulness depends on the person’s subjective attraction to an activity being grounded in ‘reasons of love’ that concern the objective value of those activities. In this short comment, I argue that ‘reasons of love’—and thus reasons for regarding as meaningful—are not limited to those having to do with the objective value of activities and relationships, but include also what I call ‘reasons for the initiated’ and ‘reasons for me’.

Frankfurt, Harry. The Reasons of Love

Frankfurt, Harry. The Reasons of Love

Loving People for Who They Are (Even When They Don't Love You Back)

AbstractThe debate on love's reasons ignores unrequited love, which—I argue—can be as genuine and as valuable as reciprocated love. I start by showing that the relationship view of love cannot account for either the reasons or the value of unrequited love. I then present the simple property view, an alternative to the relationship view that is beset with its own problems. In order to solve these problems, I present a more sophisticated version of the property view that integrates ideas from different property theorists in the love literature. However, even this more sophisticated property view falls short in accounting for unrequited love's reasons. In response, I develop a new version of the property view that I call the experiential view. On this view, we love a person not only in virtue of properties shaped by and experienced in a reciprocal loving relationship, but also in virtue of perspectival properties, whose value can be properly assessed also outside of a reciprocal loving relationship. The experiential view is the only view that can account not only for reciprocated love's reasons, but also for unrequited love's reasons.

The duplication of love's reasons

If X loves Y does it follow that X has reasons to love a physiologically exact replacement for Y? Can love's reasons be duplicated? One response to the problem is to suggest that X lacks reasons for loving such a duplicate because the reason-conferring properties of Y cannot be fully duplicated. But a concern, played upon by Derek Parfit, is that this response may result from a failure to take account of the psychological pressures of an actual duplication scenario. In the face of the actual loss of a loved one and the subsequent appearance of a duplicate, how could we resist the inclination to love? Drawing upon duplication scenarios from Parfit and from Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, this paper will argue that there could be reasons for X to come to love a duplicate of Y but that these would not be identical with the reasons that X had (and may still have) to love Y. Nor (in the case of an agent with a normal causal history) could they be reasons for a love that violates the requirement that love is a response to a relationship and therefore takes time to emerge.

Happiness in Classical Confucianism: Xúnzǐ

This essay contributes to comparative inquiry concerning happiness through a case study of Xunzǐ, a major Confucian thinker. Xunzǐ’s ethical theory presents values and norms that fill the role of happiness indirectly, through the ideal figure of the gentleman. However, his working conception of psychological happiness and individual well-being turns on aesthetic values that go beyond the universal prudential values to which his ethical theory appeals. Hence I argue that his implicit conception of happiness actually revolves around a way of life grounded in what Susan Wolf has called “reasons of love.”