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Thesis

Love explains why we favour our own, but it does not justify it

Ethan Mercer Contributor
· 5 replies
Moral theoriesAnalyticModern EuropeanUtilitarianismBernard WilliamsPeter SingerMoziMencius#effective-altruism#impartiality#partiality#special-obligations
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Its coordinates: 3.2 Normative Ethics · 3.2.1 Consequence-Based Approaches · 3.2.2 Duty-Based Approaches +3 more

Where it stands

I'm the resident sceptic in my university's effective altruism group, so I spend most meetings attacking this view. For today's question I'll defend it instead and see whether anyone here can beat it.

Thesis: love explains why we favour the people we love, but it gives no moral justification for doing so. From the moral point of view, each person counts for one.

The classic case is William Godwin's, from 1793. A fire breaks out, and you can save either Archbishop Fénelon, who will go on to benefit thousands, or his chambermaid. Godwin says save Fénelon, even if the chambermaid is your mother. What magic, he asks, is there in the pronoun "my"?

I don't hold Godwin's conclusion about the archbishop. But his question is hard. If two strangers' children are drowning and my own child is drowning further off, love will pull me to my child. Is that a reason, or a very understandable bias?

Against: Bernard Williams argued that a man who rescues his wife and first checks that impartial morality permits it has "one thought too many". Confucians held that love rightly begins with family and extends outward. Care ethicists say partiality is not a flaw in morality but where it starts.

Today's question asks whether we love for qualities or for the person. My question is whether either answer gives us reasons that others are bound to respect.

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5 replies

For the thesis 2

  1. Chen Yuting

    For Fellow

    For, with a correction to how the Mohists are usually remembered. The Mozi never asked anyone to love no one in particular. Its argument for impartial care is partly that it serves your own family: if I care for other people's parents, they will care for mine. Mencius mocked this as having no father, which was unfair.

    So impartiality need not deny the pull of "my". It asks what institutions we would want if everyone's "my" counted equally. That is your thesis in its strongest form.

  2. Ethan Mercer

    For Contributor

    Thamarai's point is the one I can't answer from inside the thesis. I can say partiality is a bias in drowning cases, but I can't say the daily work of care is a bias without sounding absurd.

    So, a narrower thesis I'd still defend: when the stakes for strangers are very large, love gives you a reason, but not a reason that silences theirs. That is weaker than Godwin and stronger than Williams.

Against the thesis 3

  1. Ji-woo Ryu

    Against Fellow

    Against. Mencius has a direct exchange with a Mohist, Yi Zhi, who says love has no gradations and only begins with one's parents. Mencius replies, roughly: does Yi Zhi really believe a man loves his brother's son exactly as he loves his neighbour's baby?

    Mencius's point is that love has a structure, and the structure is not a bias laid over an impartial core. Take it away and you do not get impartial love. You get no love at all, only a principle.

  2. Thamarai Raman

    Against Contributor

    Against, from a kitchen in Penang at bath time. When my son is ill, I am not running a calculation and then cheating in his favour. Caring for him is my moral life, not an exception to it. Nel Noddings built a whole ethics on that starting point.

    Ethan, your drowning case is real, but notice it is an emergency. Most of morality is not emergencies. It is the daily work of looking after particular people, and an ethics that treats all of that as forgivable bias has misdescribed most of what good people actually do.

  3. Olivier Mbarga

    Against Fellow

    Against, from a priest who was taught that charity must be ordered. Aquinas has a whole question on this, the order of charity. We should love those closer to us more, he says, because the bond of nature and of shared life is a real reason, not a bias. He does not think this makes the stranger count for less before God. He thinks it divides the labour of love.

    That is my answer to Godwin's "what magic is there in the pronoun my?" There is no magic. There is responsibility. My mother was given to me, and I to her, in a way that the archbishop was not.

    In my parish this is not theory. People with very little give first to their own families, then to the church, then to strangers, and the order is part of what keeps the giving going. Thamarai is right that care is a moral life, not an exception to it.