Love, Reasons, and Desire
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Love, Reasons, and Desire Nicholas Drake 1 Accepted: 28 April 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
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. Keywords Love . Reasons . Desire . Subjectivism . Partiality
1 Introduction This essay defends subjectivism about reasons of love. By reasons of love, I mean 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. (Hereafter I will refer to normative reasons just as “reasons.”) Subjectivism about reasons is the view that a person’s reasons are correctly explained by her desires. Subjectivism about reasons of love, then, is the view that a person’s reasons to treat those she loves especially well are correctly explained by
* Nicholas Drake [email protected]
1
Washington University in St. Louis, 1 Brookings Drive, St Louis, MO 63130, USA
N. Drake
her desires. Subjectivism about reasons of love can also be described as the view that a person’s reasons to treat those she loves especially well are determined by her desires, or grounded by her desires. The view has also been called subjectivism about a kind of partiality, and subjectivism about reasons of intimacy (Keller 2013, Lord 2016, Jeske 2001, 2008).1 There has been no argument for subjectivism specifically about reasons of love by philosophers as far as I am able to tell.2 However, if subjectivism about reasons is correct, then all reasons are correctly explained by desires, and so subjectivism about reasons of love is also correct. Subjectivism about reasons is a prominent contender among metaethical views (e.g. Hubin 1999, Manne 2014, Schroeder 2007, Sobel 2016a, Street 2010, 2012, 2016, Williams 1981a), and this is a reason to take subjectivism about reasons of love seriously. As subjectivism about reasons is the view that all reasons are correctly explained by desires, if there is a kind of reason that is not correctly explained by desires—such as reasons of love— then subjectivism about reasons is false. Thus, it matters for metaethics whether objections to subjecti
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