The Rationality of Love

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A common argument against the view that love is an emotion turns on the widely held intuition that whereas emotions are subject to standards of justification or rationality, love is reasonless and arational. As Sam Shpall (2020) notes, love on the no-reasons view is akin to non-instrumental desire on procedural approaches to practical rationality. Non-instrumental desire on these approaches is only subject to internal consistency constraints.

A commonly cited piece of evidence for the apparent asymmetry is that while we can easily provide reasons for our emotions, we are often taken aback if asked to produce reasons for love. As Robert Solomon puts it, "most people are quite incoherent if not speechless about producing reasons for loving a particular person" (2002: 12). If asked “Why do you love her?” we may simply reply with "I don't know. I just do." If, however, we are asked “Why do you hate her?" or "Why do you admire her?", it would not be satisfactory to answer with "I don’t know, I just do." Alan Soble remarks that "[reasonless] hate looks pathological, and we would help someone experiencing it to get over it" (2005: II). We expect people to be able to give reasons for hating or admiring another person. When people are unable to give reasons, we suspect that their hatred or admiration is inappropriate.

Further, while we can lead others to reject how they feel in response to rational argument, we cannot typically bring ourselves or others around to love or cease to love someone in this way. As Natasha McKeever puts it, "I might say, 'You should admire Jemma because she’s intelligent, thoughtful, has great values, and has made it all on her own,' and there is at least some chance that you will agree. However, I cannot persuade you to love her" (2019: 210). This difference between love and other emotions is alleged to bear on love being unresponsive to reasons.

Before addressing this objection, let's dwell for a moment on the nature of the reasons that lie at the center of this objection. The reasons we provide to justify emotions are reasons intended to establish that a given emotion fits its proper object. For example, "Jemma has admirable qualities like intelligence, thoughtfulness, and great values" is intended to establish that the speaker's admiration of Jemma fits Jemma. As Justin D'arms and Daniel Jacobsen (2000) have argued, when an emotion fits its proper object, the object can be said to possess the attributes denoted by so-called Y-able adjectives, such as "admirable," "pitiable," and "regrettable," alongside variations like "fearsome," "hateful," "blameworthy," and "disgusting."

Emotional Fit: Emotion Y fits its proper object O just in case O is Y-able.

Here, statements of the form "O is Y-able" do not express the proposition that O has a disposition to be Y-ed. Rather, as D'arms and Jacobsen point out, they carry the purport that it is apt to direct Y to O. For example, "Jemma is admirable" carries the purport that it is apt to admire Jemma.

In light of this clarification, let's now turn to the alleged asymmetries between love and other emotions when it comes to reasons and rationality. I am particularly skeptical of the premise that love is all that different from other holistic emotions, such as admiration, respect, hate, and contempt. Certainly, in contemporary, Western culture, friendship love is not typically a matter of falling in love. Rather, to make a mere acquaintanceship progress to a close friendship—the most natural context of friendship love—we typically embark on various intentional actions that we know will advance the acquaintanceship. While unreciprocated romantic love seems to be more common than unrequited friendship love, romantic love in the context of romantic relationships follows a similar pattern. As Shpall notes, "When we narrate actual stories of romance we tend to describe processes constituted, in part, by many deliberately undertaken intentional actions, actions that contribute to escalating passion and commitment over time" (2020: 418).

But even if it is true that we find it more difficult to conjure up reasons for love compared to certain other emotions, there is no general asymmetry of this kind. Disgust is a case in point. Most of us naturally react with disgust to other people's bodily excretions and skin growths, such as vomit, cold sores, and warts. If asked to provide reasons for our disgust of vomit, cold sores, and warts, we may list the prudential concern that coming into contact with such bodily excretions and skin growths could make us sick. But most of us would be hard-pressed to explain why we find other people's ear wax, dandruff, sweat, urine, semen, and menstruation disgusting. If asked why, it seems reasonable to reply with "I just do" or "It's just how I feel."

As Martha Nusbaum (2018) has argued, disgust is tied to fear of death and our own bodily decay as we get older. We associate things that remind us of our animal nature with contamination or impurity, such as corpses, rotting meat, and bodily fluids, because we fear and despise our mortal bodily humanity. But at best this explanation provides a causal reason for our disgust, not a justifying one.

Similarly, rational argument does not usually help persuade us to stop being disgusted by something that we already find repulsive. In fact, in one of their studies, Paul Rozin and colleagues asked participants to watch them sterilize a cockroach (Rozin, & Fallon, 1987). The subjects denied seeing any danger in eating it. Yet they refused to consume it. The experimenters then sealed a sterilized cockroach inside a digestible plastic capsule guaranteed to come out intact in the feces. But to no avail. The volunteers refused to swallow the capsule.

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Attempting to persuade others to be disgusted by something that isn't already repulsive to them tends to be equally pointless. If you are not already disgusted by other people's tears, for example, you are unlikely to be persuaded by argumentation. In most cases, then, no describable aspect of an object we find repulsive seems to justify our disgust. So, love is no outlier among the emotions.

A natural comeback is to try to extrapolate Soble's intuition that reasonless hate looks pathological to fit the case at hand. More specifically, our opponent may insist that our inability to provide justification for why other people's ear wax, dandruff, sweat, urine, semen, or menstruation disgusts us—or for our unwillingness to swallow a safely encapsulated cockroach—just goes to show that our disgust is unjustified. Unlike herpes sores, feces, and rotting meat, another person's ear wax, say, doesn't normally present a health risk to us. So, whereas our disgust of herpes sores, feces, and rotting meat is justified, our disgust of ear wax is not.

However, this reply is unsuccessful, as it appeals to prudential (or perhaps evolution-based) reasons to explain why disgust of herpes sores is justified but disgust of ear wax is not. But as D'arms and Jacobsen (2000) argue, fitness reasons and prudential/moral reasons are not on a par. An emotion can be fitting, even if it is unwise or morally wrong to feel that way, and vice versa. One of their examples concerns grief:

[I]f you are widowed with young children, you must bring them up as best you can. Too much grief risks further harm to them, so it is incumbent upon you not to fall apart. Since the children need to go on with their lives, with as much security and as little trauma as possible, it would be wrong to indulge in the fitting amount of sorrow-the amount that accurately reflects the sadness of the situation. But this is not to suggest that the loss of a spouse isn't all that sad (2000: 77).

D'arms and Jacobsen's example shows that moral considerations (or special relationship considerations) for or against an emotion can come apart from considerations of fit. But it is not hard to imagine a variation on their example where prudential considerations would count against grieving to an extent that would be fitting. The main point, though, is this: as emotions can be fitting but prudentially verboten, and unfitting yet prudentially permissible, showing that you will be fine after getting in close proximity to, say, another person's ear wax fails to establish that disgust of ear wax is unfitting.

Following the standard distinction between epistemic and practical rationality and reason, we can say that the fittingness of emotions provides epistemic justification for emotions, thus further eliminating the temptation to bring prudential concerns to bear on the question of an emotion's fittingness.

Ultimately, I am skeptical that settling the question of whether an emotion is fitting will even help us settle the question of whether the emotion is epistemically justified. If your admiration of Jemma is based on a fantasy, but it so happens that she has the admirable qualities your fantasy projects onto her, then your admiration is fitting, despite its fantastical nature. But arguably, it is not epistemically justified, or rational. At the very least, for an emotion to be epistemically justified, it must fit the properties on which it is based.

Prudential and moral considerations bear on the practical justification of emotions only insofar as they lead to, or prevent, the formation of intentions to perform certain actions. For example, in D'arms and Jacobsen's widow case, it is incumbent upon the widow not to grieve her loss to the extent that is fitting only insofar as her grief causes or motivates her to act immorally or imprudently or violates special relationship duties.

In a similar vein, we can say that friendship love and romantic love are epistemically unjustified, or irrational, when they don't fit the qualities of the beloved that fueled the love. If your romantic partner or friend has inherently good qualities, but your love of her is based on a projection of a fantasy onto her, your love does not fit the qualities of the beloved that fueled your love. So, your love fails to be epistemically justified.

Friendship love and romantic love are practically irrational when they motivate the lover to do something that runs counter to prudential or moral concerns or special relationship concerns. In her memoir Crazy Love (2009), Leslie Morgan Steiner details the domestic violence she suffered during her four-year relationship with her ex-husband Conor. He choked her, punched her, banged her against a wall, knocked her down the stairs, broke glass over her face, held a gun to her head, took the keys out of the ignition on the highway. As the title of the memoir makes plain, Steiner’s love is deeply irrational, verging on madness. Victims of intimate partner violence sometimes stay with their abuser out of fear of repercussions and backlash if they leave. This is not irrational. But Steiner didn’t stay for reasons of fear. Not initially, at least. When Conor broke a glass frame over her head, slitting open her face, her only thoughts were: "Don’t let this happen. I do still love him. He is my family." Staying with an abuser for reasons of love, as Steiner did, vitiates prudential concerns (and sometimes even moral concerns).