develop this idea, considering whether people’s properties provide us with the reasons for loving them. Chapter Three: Do we love people because of their properties? 1) Introduction This thesis seeks to understand whether there is value in monogamy. As explained in the introduction, in order to answer this question, we need first to understand what it means to love someone romantically and what value there is to this kind of love. In the previous chapter I argued that Frankfurt’s account of love overlooks the distinct value of romantic love, some of which derives from its selectivity and conditionality. In this chapter, I consider the claim that love is a rational response to the qualities of the beloved. This view is in some ways the direct opposite of Frankfurt’s view. I call the view that love is a positive evaluative response to certain characteristics of a person the ‘quality view’ or the ‘properties view’. I will argue that, though the properties of the beloved will get us some way towards understanding why we love them, taken on its own, this view is unable to account for the reasons for and the phenomenology of romantic love. The structure of this chapter will be as follows: I will first outline the quality view and explain how it contrasts with Frankfurt’s account of love. I will then discuss seven problems the quality view faces as a theory of love, before considering two more nuanced versions of the view, which also take the romantic relationship into account – Neil Delaney’s and Simon Keller’s. Both of these views are an improvement on the simple quality view because they also acknowledge the significance of the romantic relationship. However, both want to maintain that love is grounded on the properties of the beloved and so their accounts still face some of the objections to the simple quality view. Indeed, most of the most persuasive comments they make about romantic love are about its connection to a particular kind of relationship rather than to the qualities of the beloved. I will conclude that we need more careful analysis of the romantic relationship to understand romantic love and that a person’s qualities by themselves do not justify love even if they might cause us to be initially attracted to them.
develop this idea, considering whether people’s properties provide us with the reasons for loving them. Chapter Three: Do we love people because of their properties? 1) Introduction This thesis seeks to understand whether there is value in monogamy. As explained in the introduction, in order to answer this question, we need first to understand what it means to love someone romantically and what value there is to this kind of love. In the previous chapter I argued that Frankfurt’s account of love overlooks the distinct value of romantic love, some of which derives from its selectivity and conditionality. In this chapter, I consider the claim that love is a rational response to the qualities of the beloved. This view is in some ways the direct opposite of Frankfurt’s view. I call the view that love is a positive evaluative response to certain characteristics of a person the ‘quality view’ or the ‘properties view’. I will argue that, though the properties of the beloved will get us some way towards understanding why we love them, taken on its own, this view is unable to account for the reasons for and the phenomenology of romantic love. The structure of this chapter will be as follows: I will first outline the quality view and explain how it contrasts with Frankfurt’s account of love. I will then discuss seven problems the quality view faces as a theory of love, before considering two more nuanced versions of the view, which also take the romantic relationship into account – Neil Delaney’s and Simon Keller’s. Both of these views are an improvement on the simple quality view because they also acknowledge the significance of the romantic relationship. However, both want to maintain that love is grounded on the properties of the beloved and so their accounts still face some of the objections to the simple quality view. Indeed, most of the most persuasive comments they make about romantic love are about its connection to a particular kind of relationship rather than to the qualities of the beloved. I will conclude that we need more careful analysis of the romantic relationship to understand romantic love and that a person’s qualities by themselves do not justify love even if they might cause us to be initially attracted to them.
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