Readings
Texts
- Annette Baier, "Unsafe Loves" (pdf, from last time)
- Harry Frankfurt, "The Reasons of Love" (read chapter one)
Reading Quiz Questions
- Why is love risky, according to Baier?
- What is Baier's theory of love?
- Why does Frankfurt conclude that "even quite reasonable and respectable people find that other things may sometimes mean more to them, and make stronger claims upon them, than either morality or themselves"?
- Why does Frankfurt conclude no purely rational justification for how to order our lives is possible?
Synopsis
Today we picked up where we left off last time: Baier's account of romantic love and her immensely interesting discussion of why love is necessarily so risky
Baier's article does a nice job of exploring two philosophical traditions on love: What she calls the misamorist tradition, which holds that love is something to be scorned by reason, and the natural tradition, which holds that love is simply a feature of the fundamentally social kind of animal we are, which is ultimately in the interests of procreation.
Baier, of course, is sympathetic to the natural tradition, taking many of her cues from the brilliant philosopher David Hume.
For Baier, love is neither mutual vulnerability alone nor the extension of welfare alone. Instead, love is a kind of meta-emotion, a deep commitment to the gearing or meshing of the lover's emotions to the beloved's in such a way that love is risky, because we are thereby extending our emotions robustly to include others who may, alas, betray us or even die, but also rewarding, because it is a coordination of emotions that goes far beyond mere empathy or even shared welfare. Thus love is an emotion of emotions, insofar as all the other emotions follow suit in love and are thereby determined by love. Note that this is consistent with our view (recalling Loveless Joe from the beginning of the semester) that love is foundational in our emotional lives. That said, one thinks of love on Baier's account as going well beyond even empathy, at least insofar as one might have empathy for another person in one respect but not in others, whereas Baier's account of love in terms of the gearing, meshing, harmonizing, or coordination (pick your favorite metaphor) of emotions suggests a kind of total and ongoing mutuality of emotional lives.
As with Singer, Firestone, and Nozick, though, so, however, with Baier: We seem to have an account of what happens when one loves, but that doesn't tell us what love is. Perhaps, as some might astutely now suspect, love itself is simply a mystery. We know given all these accounts what love does for (and, perhaps, to) us, but love itself is somehow off-limits. We shouldn't be any more concerned with understanding love than gravity. It is enough that the apple falls, or the person falls in love.
Maybe so. I want to argue that just as with gravity, it is important to do what we can to understand love precisely because, like gravity, it is at once a potent force in our lives and still a mystery, which is troubling. In any case, who doesn't love a good mystery?
Those skeptical of giving some account of love bear the burden of explaining why love is special in such a way that it necessarily escapes our understanding--a tall order, I think. Yet philosophical skepticism is, to be sure, an important and valuable position to keep in mind throughout our discussions.
Moving forward today, I paused our discussions so as to properly frame Frankfurt's essay, "The Reasons of Love". Frankfurt asks first not, "what is love?", but "how should we live our lives?" This may seem like a somewhat indirect way to start a philosophical inquiry into the nature of love. Recall, though, our discussion of Loveless Joe on the first day of class: Love will doubtless be found front and center in any discussion of how we should live our lives.
The problem, as Frankfurt points out, is that of the various norms or normative systems by which we could order our lives, be they
- Moral,
- Legal,
- Religious,
- Aesthetic,
- Etiquettical, or
- Cultural/Social,
Even moral norms, which presumably trump other norms, tell us very little about how we should live our lives. Indeed, an answer cannot be found even if we consult rational norms, which should raise some eyebrows since this is, after all, a philosophical inquiry into the question of how we should live our lives. Frankfurt's argument that there is no rational, foundational justification for how we should live our lives is fairly straightforward: Any rational justification for how we should live our lives presupposes criteria for deciding between the kinds of lives we might live, but those criteria are just how we should live are lives. Thus we can only rationally justify how we should live our lives if we first know how we should live our lives, which is fundamentally circular. The best we can do, Frankfurt thinks, is to understand what is important to us and live our lives accordingly with confidence and commitment.
These considerations ultimately bear on Frankfurt's account of love, but we need a bit of background to understand what he is doing in this first chapter. This backstory will also become important later in the semester when we take up other topics, so it is worth spending some time on it this semester.
Now, what I am calling 'the backstory' is really Frankfurt's approach to the Traditional Problem of Freedom of the Will. This is a longstanding, altogether vexing problem in philosophy.
We may cast the Traditional Problem of Freedom of the Will as a dilemma:
| The Problem of Freedom of Will | |||
| 1 | Either Determinism is true or Determinism is not true. | ||
| 2 | If Determinism is true, then Freedom of Will is impossible. | ||
| 3 | If Determinism is not true, then Freedom of Will is impossible. | ||
| ∴ | 4 | Freedom of Will is impossible. | 1,2&3 |
The problem with the dilemma is that it is unclear how to respond. The first premise is simply an instance of the proposition form,
P or not P
which is tautologous--that is, necessarily true. Premise (1) is apparently untouchable. Nor is it clear, given the following argument, whether we can reject premise (2).
| The Argument from Determinism | |||
| 1 | If Determinism is true, then our actions necessarily have causes. | ||
| 2 | If Freedom of Will is possible, then at least sometimes we could have done otherwise. | ||
| 3 | If our actions necessarily have causes, then it is not the case that at least sometimes we could have done otherwise. | ||
| ∴ | 4 | If Determinism is true, then Freedom of Will is impossible. | 1,2&3 |
Note that the above argument assumes a version of Determinism called causal determinism. There are other forms of determinism which we need not pursue at this point, since much the same argument can be given in each case. The upshot is that if Determinism is true, then i) we could not have done otherwise and ii) responsibility for our actions is ultimately not us but the (external) causes of which our actions are but effects.
It's not entirely incorrect to think of the argument as proposing that if the Universe is a gigantic clockwork mechanism, and we are but cogs in the clockworks, then what we do depends not on us but on the movement of the mechanism.
The idea that it is we who determine our actions and nothing else for freedom of will to be possible is also called into question by the following argument, which serves to justify premise (3) of the Dilemma of Free Will:
| The Argument from Indeterminism | |||
| 1 | If Determinism is not true, then events do not have causes. | ||
| 2 | Actions are events. | ||
| 3 | If actions do not have causes, then they are merely spontaneous. | ||
| 4 | If actions are merely spontaneous, then Freedom of Will is impossible. | ||
| ∴ | 5 | If Determinism is not true, then Freedom of Will is impossible. | 1,2,3&4 |
Thus if our actions randomly happen for no reason whatsoever, then they are no more up to us than if we were cogs in a celestial clock.
This is important philosophically and socially, and it is important to understand why.
Consider: It is difficult to understate the importance of responsibility for our relationships and the larger society. Indeed, the assumption of responsibility underwrites our social practices. Any short list must include
- Gratitude: It would make no sense to be grateful for another person's kindness if they were under the influence of a psychoactive drug and wouldn't otherwise have given you the time of day.
- Blame: If someone does us injury purely by accident and through no fault of their own, it may for awhile make us feel better to get angry, but we can't really blame the person--accidents do sometimes happen.
- Friendship: Suppose someone were hypnotized to be your friend who otherwise wouldn't be in the least bit so inclined, perhaps because the hypnotizer pities you; if you knew, what value could you place on the friendship?
- Love: A mind-control device to make the object of our desires love us might be tempting, but would it be love?
- Punishment: It would probably be a good idea to imprison someone who randomly assaults others just to keep them from doing so in the future, but doing so could not be construed as an act of punishment since punishment makes no sense in such a case.
Missing in each case (and many others besides!) is any assurance that the object of gratitude, blame, friendship, love, or punishment acted of their own accord. That is, a necessary condition on holding someone responsible is that their actions be up to them and they presumably could have done otherwise.
Being responsible for one's own actions is, then, for one's actions to be decided by oneself, regardless of outside influences and for one's own reasons. The Traditional Problem of Freedom of the Will can be understood as an attempt to explain how one's actions can be at once free yet still be determined by one's own will. For if Determinism is true, it seems our actions cannot be free. Yet if Determinism is not true, it seems our actions cannot be determined by our own wills. We seem, then, to be caught in a remarkable--and, to philosophers at least, deeply disturbing--dilemma.
So we are hard-pressed to find solutions to the dilemma. Frankfurt offered a solution in his paper, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person". Today we gave a rough gloss of his solution which we will revisit next time, not because his solution is uncontroversial or even broadly accepted, of course, but because he employs it as a theoretical framework throughout his discussion of love.
Specifically, Frankfurt posits a certain rather plausible psychological complexity for human persons. Animals, you see, are unreflective bundles of desires: There are lots of things at any given moment they want or desire, but they don't care about what they desire in the sense that they are never troubled by, or delighted by, the desires they have. They aren't involved in their own lives in the same way human persons are. They don't care about what their desires happen to be at any moment, but humans do. We are deeply concerned about our desires. We endorse some of our desires, while others might horrify us. The care we take with respect to our desires involves us in our own lives in ways animals are not. We are, in short, reflective bundles of desires. Thus for human persons we have it that,
1. First-order desires are desires directed on specific actions. Frankfurt calls them 'wants' in "The Reasons of Love".
2. First-order effective desires are those desires that bear on the courses of actions we in fact take, have taken, or intend to take. Frankfurt does not draw a distinction between effective wants and non-effective wants in "The Reasons of Love".
3. The totality of our first-order effective desires at any given time is our will. Although Frankfurt does not explicitly define in the will in "The Reasons of Love", it does become important in chapters 2 and 3.
4. Second-order desires are desires directed on first-order desires: Recall in this regard Frankfurt's distinction (discussed in class) between the Willing Addict, the Wanton Addict, and the Unwilling Addict.
5. Second-order effective desires, or volitions, shape the content of the will by being directed on first-order effective desires. In "The Reasons of Love", Frankfurt calls these not 'volitions' but 'cares'. So when he focuses in the first chapter on what we care about, he is referring to these specific second-order effective desires--aka, volitions.
His theory is somewhat more complicated than this, but this should be just enough of the machinery to help us understand his account of love in the next two chapters.
Specifically, caring is volitional: To care about something or someone is to have second-order effective desires determining ones (first-order effective) desires with regard to it or them. Love, for Frankfurt, is a kind of caring. Being volitional, love, for Frankfurt, is central to how we order our wills and give meaning to our lives, which fits rather neatly with our original thought experiment concerning Loveless Joe.
To underscore the point, whenever Frankfurt talks about volitions, caring, or love, he is talking about reflective, or second-order desires.
Incidentally, as Frankfurt describes in this chapter, we have freedom of the will (and thus, perhaps, a solution to the problem of freedom of the will) to the extent that our wills are the wills we want to have--to the extent, that is, that our wills are a function of, or directed by, our second-order effective desires. Whether his version of compatibilism succeeds or not is a matter for another course.
With that backstory in mind, next time we will turn to the project of unpacking his account of love.