What is love
Love: Critically evaluate Nozick’s account of love by (a) proposing counterexamples to his definition, considering how he would reply, and your overall evaluation of his definition. Then explain how the autonomy and unconditional love objections and how they can be answered. Finally, based on your analysis above, explain how you would answer the question: What is love?
NOTE :Here are the autonomy and unconditional love objections: According to Nozick’s account of love, the lover has a moral obligation to surrender some of the decision making power they have over their own life to the beloved. They can no longer decide unilaterally what to do with their own life and thus MUST suffer loss of autonomy in the ‘we’ compared to being single. I argue that autonomy is incredibly important, and that ‘we’ could thus only be worth the loss incurred if we are able to demonstrate that there is some compensating gain to make up for it. Now, the ‘unconditional love objection’ is roughly as follows: If we define the difference between ‘conditional love’ and ‘unconditional love’ as the difference between ‘being loved for you qualities’ and ‘being loved for yourself’, then unconditional love is either impossible or random and senseless. It is impossible if we take a view of the self according to which you are just the collection of your qualities. In that case, nothing beyond your qualities exists to be loved, but unconditional love requires this on the definition above. So, it is impossible. If there IS something to the self beyond all of its qualities, then it must be something quality- less. But, if it is quality-less, then there is no discernible difference between any ‘selves’, since they do not possess qualities which would allow us to tell one apart from the other. In this case, it is random or senseless. In order for unconditional love to make sense, it must be defined differently than what we started with above.
NOTE :Here are the autonomy and unconditional love objections: According to Nozick’s account of love, the lover has a moral obligation to surrender some of the decision making power they have over their own life to the beloved. They can no longer decide unilaterally what to do with their own life and thus MUST suffer loss of autonomy in the ‘we’ compared to being single. I argue that autonomy is incredibly important, and that ‘we’ could thus only be worth the loss incurred if we are able to demonstrate that there is some compensating gain to make up for it. Now, the ‘unconditional love objection’ is roughly as follows: If we define the difference between ‘conditional love’ and ‘unconditional love’ as the difference between ‘being loved for you qualities’ and ‘being loved for yourself’, then unconditional love is either impossible or random and senseless. It is impossible if we take a view of the self according to which you are just the collection of your qualities. In that case, nothing beyond your qualities exists to be loved, but unconditional love requires this on the definition above. So, it is impossible. If there IS something to the self beyond all of its qualities, then it must be something quality- less. But, if it is quality-less, then there is no discernible difference between any ‘selves’, since they do not possess qualities which would allow us to tell one apart from the other. In this case, it is random or senseless. In order for unconditional love to make sense, it must be defined differently than what we started with above.
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