The Reasons of Love

What are the reasons that we value the things that we do? How do we explain the courses of action that we take? What is the criteria that guides our life choices? These are questions that moral philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt (most know for his best selling On Bullshit) asks in his book The Reasons of Love.

Frankfurt divides this book in three sections: 1)The Question: "How Should We Live?" 2) On Love, and Its Reasons, and 3) The Dear Self. He starts out by asking what should be the motivating factor in making choices that determine what kind of life we should live? Is it enough to simply pattern our choices and actions in accordance with a particular moral code? While morality may provide us with a pattern of what we should do, it seems to Frankfurt that it is insufficient to provide us with compelling reasons to act in a certain way. While we often realize that we should make a particular choice simply because it is the right and good thing to do, it would appear that most of our choices are not based simply on a determination that it is the correct moral or ethical decision to make. It seems that we need something beyond the ability to reason out a moral code to explain most of our major decisions. Frankfurt suggests that since, "Morality does not really get down to the bottom of things," it is also legitimate to take into account "what we care about, what is important to us, and what we love." This is more than simply making decisions based on simple wants or desires, which Frankfurt explains with his definition of "caring":

"When a person cares about something...he is willingly committed to his desire. The desire does not move him either against his will or without his endorsement. He is not its victim; nor is he passively indifferent to it. On the contrary, he himself desires that it move him. He is therefore prepared to intervene, should that be necessary, in order to ensure that it continues. If the desire tends to fade or to falter, he is disposed to refresh it and to reinforce whatever degree of influence he wishes it to exert upon his attitudes and upon his behavior."

This definition of caring includes a certain kind of inevitability that comes with anything that we care about or love. There is a strong sense in which we do not chose to love the things that we do, but rather that we have a desire for them that we cannot control. It is when we make a choice or a determination to maintain this desire that we truly care about someone or something.

In the second part of the book, Frankfurt goes on to show how this kind of love can be a basis in and of itself for making choices about how we are to live our lives. He notes that a husband who saves his drowning wife at the expense of another person who is also drowning would be considered to have made the right choice, simply by the fact that he loves his wife. In the same way, a parent that protects his or her children at the expense of someone else is also counted as having done the right thing. These are not choices that are made on the basis of some moral or ethical principle that tells the husband or parent that the proper choice to make is the life of their loved one; instead, these are acts, which are generally considered to be morally acceptable, simply come out of the person's love for the person in danger.

The final section of the book discusses what Frankfurt sees as the most basic sort of love, necessary to all others: love of self. Frankfurt states:

"Insofar as a person loves himself - in other words, to the extent that he is volitionally wholehearted - he does not resist any movements of his own will. He is not at odds with himself; he does not oppose, or seek to impede, the expression in practical reasoning and in conduct of whatever love his self-love entails. He is free in loving what he loves, at least in the sense that his loving is not obstructed or interfered with by himself."

For Frankfurt, self-love is a necessary requirement for an individual to be able to love others. While this might sound ego-centric, Frankfurt's conception of self-love is not the same type of self-obsessiveness that we normally associate with the term. Frankfurt defines love as that which is 1) concerned for the well being of the person loved 2) a personal concern for the person loved 3) an identification with the person loved, and 4) constraining the will. In this sense, self-love is perhaps the purest form of love. It is not necessarily good or bad in and of itself, but rather it is a necessary quality to have if one is going to be able to properly love anyone or anything else. If we are divided in our will, that in, not "volitionally wholehearted" then will be unable to show the level of dedication or care that could be considered love to anyone else.

Frankfurt has a wonderfully straightforward style and displays a level of practicality in dealing with significant philosophical themes. He makes the subject of ethics to be more than simply a matter of obligation, but rather, he takes into account the things that matter the most to us. This approach takes ethics from the abstract and displays the importance that questions of morality really play in our everyday lives. Frankfurt works from the position of compatibilism, attempting to show how a certain kind of determinism can be affirmed while human being are still held responsible for their actions. This is much the same issue that we as Reformed Christians face in our grappling with the subjects of God's sovereignty and our own responsibility. Frankfurt's affirmation that the things we love are, by definition, things that we do not choose, seems to allow for us to acknowledge the sovereign hand of God in our lives. At the same time, his understanding of "caring" as the attempt to sustain our desires appears to take into account our responsibility for our actions.