Ridiculous. Morality is about outcome, not intention, and love is decided retroactively after we experience the outcome of our interactions. I don’t care if you make a decision because you love me. If it’s a bad decision that screws up my future, then it’s still immoral.
I agree to some extent. If you're blinded by your own ignorance or selfishness then intentions seem less important. For example, parents that force their child to study medicine because of their own fixed ideas, depriving them of a happier and more fulfilling life as an artist.
But most people would argue that intention often plays a role. If I buy you a device that - unbeknownst to anyone - has a defect which makes it explode and you lose a limb, I would be incredibly sorry that it happened but the gift wouldn't be an immoral act.
Yea I mean I don’t really respect the legal world very much. You can see the failure of this with popularized cases like Brock Turner, who was guilty but given only 6 months because the Judge essentially decided his mind wasn’t that guilty and instead he “had a great future ahead of him”. “Guilty mind” is basically just saying “I don’t find the defendant to be relatable” and so it’s no wonder that people of different races and ethnic groups are significantly more likely to go to jail and get higher sentences for the exact same crimes.
Edit: also, let’s be very clear: the point of law is to decide whether or not someone should be punished; not to decide whether or not someone is immoral. Those are two separate things.
The only reason I can imagine you’d add this to the convo is if you feel like having a cohesive philosophy of ethics necessarily enables you to live a moral life with no immorality. IMO even with perfect philosophical understanding, you can still end up acting immorally. It’s always a possibility and no philosophy will ever save you from that.
No, PP added that to the convo to explain why an ethical framework that requires waiting for an act's outcome to fully play out is not a useful framework.
“Useful” as in: a framework that gets the result you want. And yet the framework they’re describing has a serious and obvious flaw, and so it won’t reliably get the result they want.
If we believe in intention, then how can we ever understand all the examples of people that had good intentions but still ended up acting immorally? We can argue they’re lying or that their intentions weren’t pure enough for our taste, but there absolutely will be cases that don’t fall into those two categories. Also, even with all our philosophy, psychology, and experience, we have no idea what their internal world was like. We might as well just be reading tea leaves.
The whole function of treating ethics this way is to provide reassurance to everyone that they don’t need to worry about screwing everything up… but it’s just reassurance. You need reassurance because your anxiety is valid. There’s no philosophical framework or purity of heart that can save you from making a bad decision that does more bad than good. You just have to do the best you can.
This concept isn’t actually particularly novel in ethics as the article suggests. I’d argue that Kantian ethics is based fundamentally on the notion of love for mankind, aka treating mankind as the ultimate end for all of our actions. Zizek and a lot of contemporary philosophers also talk about love’s power to transcend ourselves which is instrumental for being more altruistic.
The most common definition in Critical Theory right now for love is a willingness to expend effort for someone else’s wellbeing. Although this can be related to attachment, it can also be decoupled entirely from it, similar to the concepts in The Brothers Karamazov
‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and most important commandment. The second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as you love yourself.
I think you can find significantly older version of the same idea ("compassion" in Buddhism, maybe?), but that is an actual quote I can call to mind
How does one precisely define love for purposes of defining morality?
The article’s author was very imprecise, defining love and morality in subjective terms relating to one’s personal outlook and perceptions of others.
I’m not at all interested in subjective morality.
The reason most philosophers have defined morality and ethics in terms of duties and obligations is precisely to try to remove subjectivity. I’m not saying anyone has been successful, but other approaches don’t appear to lead towards objective morality.
Virtue ethics (Aristotle), care ethics (Noddings), and agape traditions have all developed structured frameworks for defining love as a moral foundation without sacrificing objectivity or universality.
It's pretty clear what virtue meant to Aristotle: respect the place you were given in the natural order. So if you're, say, a slave, you should work for your master without rebellion, and if you're, say, an Athenian upperclassman, you should... uh... enjoy yourself?
If you ask me, that's a pretty convenient definition of morality for them.
There's no universal judge to establish "the rules," the only justification for morality is what justification we can argue.
Objectivity can be found in science because eventually you find the universal, unbreakable rule that determines whatever you're studying. No such thing exists in morality, since it's a subjective human invention.
Murdoch is unusual among philosophers in also being a world-class novelist. Her Black Prince is one of my favourites and explores the concepts described in the article.
There are some parts of London which are necessary and some which are contingent. Everywhere west of Earls Court is contingent, except for a few places along the river. I hate contingency. I want everything in my life to have a sufficient reason. Dave lived west of Earls Court, and this was another thing I had against him.
I've only read one book by Iris Murdoch - The sea, the sea - a brilliant psychological drama that is indeed the opposite of lovey dovey. It's more about the delusions of love and self image, but much much more than that.
The examples are a little flakey. For instance, a “change in perspective” can itself become a form of self-deception in which we choose to ignore or deny or distorts truths that are unpleasant to us. It’s one thing to be charitable and to restrain premature judgements or to recognize some kind of genuine prejudice operating within us. It’s another to be Pollyannish and to deny what you know.
But I didn’t come here to pick apart the article. Rather, I want to address the main thesis which concerns love, morality, and the relation between the two. The author mentions that there is precedent in certain religious traditions to link the two — it fact, you can also see precedent in philosophical thought, like that of the Greeks — but the terms are not really given anything resembling definitions.
So, what is morality? Morality concerns voluntary actions in relation to the good. What makes a good action? One that furthers the actualization of an agent’s nature, which is to say the good of the agent. This is why choosing to eat vegetables is generally morally good, because it provides us with nutrients that sustain and contribute to our flourishing, and morally bad to eat shards of glass, because these act in opposition to our flourishing, incompatible as they are with our metabolism and destructive given the composition of our digestive system. Morality is about the voluntary acts of the agent as they concern the good of the acting agent.
(Now, some may be surprised, given the common framing of moral questions as mostly or entirely concerning “the other”. The key is to understand that human nature is deeply social. To act in ways that are opposed to our social nature is detrimental to us. Thus, for a human agent to murder a human being, the most odious of acts, is for the acting human agent to do severe harm to themselves through the very act of murdering someone. The injustice of the act is deeply corrupting and destructive to the acting human agent.)
Now that we have a definition of what morality is, what is love? Love is a movement toward the good. Love can be classified into two kinds, namely, eros and agape. Eros is ascending love, or the agent’s willing of a good for the sake of his own good. The agent recognizes that he lacks some good that would perfect and actualize him as the kind of thing he is, recognizes it in another, and seeks that good for his sake. The agent seeks to receive. Apage, which in Latin is caritas from which we get “charity”, is descending love, or a willing of the good of the other. The agent seeks to give. Agape is a matter of actualizing the good of the other in some way, but acting for the sake of the good of the other also spiritually actualizes the good of the giver.
So, if morality concerns voluntary actions for the sake of the good, and love is a voluntary movement toward the good, then of course morality is intrinsically concerned with love.
The idea that morality is grounded in love rather than rules sounds appealing but it collapses once applied outside personal relationships. Love is subjective and unevenly distributed. People love their family more than strangers, their country more than foreigners. If morality is only love, then preference and bias become virtue. That is no foundation for fairness in law, politics, or daily life.
Rules and duties exist to correct for partiality. The point of justice is that it applies equally, even when love does not. A judge cannot acquit someone because she loves him, a doctor cannot favour a patient because he is charming. Love without principle too easily becomes nepotism or tribalism. The most brutal conflicts in history were driven by deep love for one’s own group, not lack of it.
Love matters for motivation. It can inspire people to act with kindness. But moral frameworks require more than sentiment. They need universality and consistency, which only rules and duties can provide. Murdoch’s vision mistakes a source of energy for the standard itself. Without shared norms, love does not scale beyond the private sphere.
It seems that you are conflating attachment with love, which is often done, but always wrong. They are absolutely not the same thing and are at odds with one another as often as they align, if not more often - as your examples illustrate.
It is possible to hold love for everyone, in any situation, regardless of the circumstances. Of course no one is perfect and so just because something is possible does not mean it always occurs. But this is not the point.
The point is that the origin of morality is love. In the absence of the experience of love, it is possible to approximate the correct behaviours to imitate it, but it is a pale and brittle imitation of real love-derived action and most often descends into immorality under pressure or nuance.
The modern justice system is a fantastic example of this. It doesn't work in any but the most extreme cases - and even then there is an argument to be made against it. Locking people up like animals doesn't improve society or help the offenders. It provides a temporary relief to victims but even that is hollow. Punishing children has been repeatedly shown to be ineffective for correcting behaviour. Why we think adults are different is a simply a lack of love.
The distinction between love and attachment is valid, but it does not solve the problem. Even if one defines love as universal, impartial goodwill, it remains aspirational and fragile. To say morality originates only in love is to assume a capacity that human beings rarely sustain in practice. That is precisely why societies construct rules and duties: to create reliable standards even when love fails.
The justice system is far from perfect, but dismissing it as a “brittle imitation” overlooks what it prevents. Most people are not saints. Universal love may be possible in theory, but history shows that in practice societies without enforceable norms often descend into cycles of revenge, corruption, or rule by the strongest. Systems of law are crude, but they are better than trusting every individual to embody unconditional love.
Rehabilitation and restorative justice models do exist, and they align with the spirit of love by seeking repair rather than punishment. But they are still structured by rules. Without those, there is no guarantee of fairness or safety. Love can inspire moral action, but rules are what make morality workable in communities of imperfect humans.
The issue of love's notorious inconsistency is especially damaging to using it as a foundation of an ethical system. If I acted when I loved something and then decided later on that I didn't love it and would make a different choice, which frame of mind do I use to evaluate the morality of the decision?
Philosophers have pretty much torn love apart as a basis for an ethical framework. It is true we're all very biased and love plays a role in how we perceive but morality has to be based on slightly more objective concepts like fairness, evidence and precedence that we have a chance of evaluating consistently when our feelings change.
The essay goes into this, clearly means love in a different way to how you've taken it, and doesn't exclude the use of rules to codify it:
"Loving attention: a kind of just, patient, generous attention to others. This, she thinks, is what will improve the moral quality of our vision and put us in touch with reality as it truly is. Loving attention, she insists, is central to morality, and that is because it draws us out of ourselves towards the object of love, overcoming our habitual tendency to turn inward."
This conception is simplistic, a straw man, and one that appears to be wholly ignorant of the Cosmopolitan tradition and reasonable criticisms thereof.
That would mean harming themselves and everyone they know. Who would agree to that and why? Such a person would not be of sound mind, and fit to be in a position make judgment on these matters.
State your case for this absurd rule. To paraphrase Hitchens, that which is asserted casually can be dismissed casually.
Morality without rules is arbitrary and unpredictable. The thesis is that morality without rules isn’t workable. Maybe it’s clearer when replacing “rules” by “principles”.
Morality is about how you treat people you don't love.
One of the worst parts of humanity is that we're too often worse to those we are close to than to strangers.
I’d argue the opposite:
One of the worst parts of humanity is that we’re bad to those close to us in the name of far away, nebulous benefits.
Ridiculous. Morality is about outcome, not intention, and love is decided retroactively after we experience the outcome of our interactions. I don’t care if you make a decision because you love me. If it’s a bad decision that screws up my future, then it’s still immoral.
I agree to some extent. If you're blinded by your own ignorance or selfishness then intentions seem less important. For example, parents that force their child to study medicine because of their own fixed ideas, depriving them of a happier and more fulfilling life as an artist.
But most people would argue that intention often plays a role. If I buy you a device that - unbeknownst to anyone - has a defect which makes it explode and you lose a limb, I would be incredibly sorry that it happened but the gift wouldn't be an immoral act.
It's a good thing the law doesn't share your view.
Look up mens rea.
Yea I mean I don’t really respect the legal world very much. You can see the failure of this with popularized cases like Brock Turner, who was guilty but given only 6 months because the Judge essentially decided his mind wasn’t that guilty and instead he “had a great future ahead of him”. “Guilty mind” is basically just saying “I don’t find the defendant to be relatable” and so it’s no wonder that people of different races and ethnic groups are significantly more likely to go to jail and get higher sentences for the exact same crimes.
Edit: also, let’s be very clear: the point of law is to decide whether or not someone should be punished; not to decide whether or not someone is immoral. Those are two separate things.
well everyone, we can just stop discussing what has been discussed for thousands on thousands of years since this guy figured out what morality is.
your comment sounds insane. you live in the now not in the future.
“You live in the now not in the future”
The only reason I can imagine you’d add this to the convo is if you feel like having a cohesive philosophy of ethics necessarily enables you to live a moral life with no immorality. IMO even with perfect philosophical understanding, you can still end up acting immorally. It’s always a possibility and no philosophy will ever save you from that.
No, PP added that to the convo to explain why an ethical framework that requires waiting for an act's outcome to fully play out is not a useful framework.
“Useful” as in: a framework that gets the result you want. And yet the framework they’re describing has a serious and obvious flaw, and so it won’t reliably get the result they want.
If we believe in intention, then how can we ever understand all the examples of people that had good intentions but still ended up acting immorally? We can argue they’re lying or that their intentions weren’t pure enough for our taste, but there absolutely will be cases that don’t fall into those two categories. Also, even with all our philosophy, psychology, and experience, we have no idea what their internal world was like. We might as well just be reading tea leaves.
The whole function of treating ethics this way is to provide reassurance to everyone that they don’t need to worry about screwing everything up… but it’s just reassurance. You need reassurance because your anxiety is valid. There’s no philosophical framework or purity of heart that can save you from making a bad decision that does more bad than good. You just have to do the best you can.
This concept isn’t actually particularly novel in ethics as the article suggests. I’d argue that Kantian ethics is based fundamentally on the notion of love for mankind, aka treating mankind as the ultimate end for all of our actions. Zizek and a lot of contemporary philosophers also talk about love’s power to transcend ourselves which is instrumental for being more altruistic.
The most common definition in Critical Theory right now for love is a willingness to expend effort for someone else’s wellbeing. Although this can be related to attachment, it can also be decoupled entirely from it, similar to the concepts in The Brothers Karamazov
I would say it is a lot older. For example:
‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and most important commandment. The second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as you love yourself.
I think you can find significantly older version of the same idea ("compassion" in Buddhism, maybe?), but that is an actual quote I can call to mind
Is it really love if someone's commanding you to do it?
Yes, because you cannot fake love. You cannot love simply as following a command.
You can certainly try to be more loving, but it is still love. It requires a change in yourself.
The real point is that the point of commandments is to facilitate love, and they should be interpreted in that light.
How does one precisely define love for purposes of defining morality?
The article’s author was very imprecise, defining love and morality in subjective terms relating to one’s personal outlook and perceptions of others.
I’m not at all interested in subjective morality.
The reason most philosophers have defined morality and ethics in terms of duties and obligations is precisely to try to remove subjectivity. I’m not saying anyone has been successful, but other approaches don’t appear to lead towards objective morality.
Virtue ethics (Aristotle), care ethics (Noddings), and agape traditions have all developed structured frameworks for defining love as a moral foundation without sacrificing objectivity or universality.
I'm not familiar with care ethics but I'm somewhat of a fan of Virtue ethics
However I do that Virtue ethics is not terribly objective. You could argue endlessly about what the virtues are
It's pretty clear what virtue meant to Aristotle: respect the place you were given in the natural order. So if you're, say, a slave, you should work for your master without rebellion, and if you're, say, an Athenian upperclassman, you should... uh... enjoy yourself?
If you ask me, that's a pretty convenient definition of morality for them.
Why do you believe that there is such a thing as objective morality?
>I’m not at all interested in subjective morality.
I have bad news for you. That's all there is.
Factional conclusion regarding a contentious subject and worded blithely.
There's no universal judge to establish "the rules," the only justification for morality is what justification we can argue.
Objectivity can be found in science because eventually you find the universal, unbreakable rule that determines whatever you're studying. No such thing exists in morality, since it's a subjective human invention.
Not even in science. Any knowledge requires its axioms. That's the bitter lesson.
Murdoch is unusual among philosophers in also being a world-class novelist. Her Black Prince is one of my favourites and explores the concepts described in the article.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Prince_(novel)
Oddly, I know her only as a novelist and am surprised to learn (right now) that she was also a philosopher.
There are some parts of London which are necessary and some which are contingent. Everywhere west of Earls Court is contingent, except for a few places along the river. I hate contingency. I want everything in my life to have a sufficient reason. Dave lived west of Earls Court, and this was another thing I had against him.
Iris Murdoch Under the net, Chatto & Windus, 1954
This title may make Murdoch sound more didactic than she really was; her novels don't feature any traditional lovey-dovey happy endings.
I've only read one book by Iris Murdoch - The sea, the sea - a brilliant psychological drama that is indeed the opposite of lovey dovey. It's more about the delusions of love and self image, but much much more than that.
Nice review here: https://youtu.be/s3UOXnv2YsU?feature=shared
The examples are a little flakey. For instance, a “change in perspective” can itself become a form of self-deception in which we choose to ignore or deny or distorts truths that are unpleasant to us. It’s one thing to be charitable and to restrain premature judgements or to recognize some kind of genuine prejudice operating within us. It’s another to be Pollyannish and to deny what you know.
But I didn’t come here to pick apart the article. Rather, I want to address the main thesis which concerns love, morality, and the relation between the two. The author mentions that there is precedent in certain religious traditions to link the two — it fact, you can also see precedent in philosophical thought, like that of the Greeks — but the terms are not really given anything resembling definitions.
So, what is morality? Morality concerns voluntary actions in relation to the good. What makes a good action? One that furthers the actualization of an agent’s nature, which is to say the good of the agent. This is why choosing to eat vegetables is generally morally good, because it provides us with nutrients that sustain and contribute to our flourishing, and morally bad to eat shards of glass, because these act in opposition to our flourishing, incompatible as they are with our metabolism and destructive given the composition of our digestive system. Morality is about the voluntary acts of the agent as they concern the good of the acting agent.
(Now, some may be surprised, given the common framing of moral questions as mostly or entirely concerning “the other”. The key is to understand that human nature is deeply social. To act in ways that are opposed to our social nature is detrimental to us. Thus, for a human agent to murder a human being, the most odious of acts, is for the acting human agent to do severe harm to themselves through the very act of murdering someone. The injustice of the act is deeply corrupting and destructive to the acting human agent.)
Now that we have a definition of what morality is, what is love? Love is a movement toward the good. Love can be classified into two kinds, namely, eros and agape. Eros is ascending love, or the agent’s willing of a good for the sake of his own good. The agent recognizes that he lacks some good that would perfect and actualize him as the kind of thing he is, recognizes it in another, and seeks that good for his sake. The agent seeks to receive. Apage, which in Latin is caritas from which we get “charity”, is descending love, or a willing of the good of the other. The agent seeks to give. Agape is a matter of actualizing the good of the other in some way, but acting for the sake of the good of the other also spiritually actualizes the good of the giver.
So, if morality concerns voluntary actions for the sake of the good, and love is a voluntary movement toward the good, then of course morality is intrinsically concerned with love.
Who defines 'good'?
> Who defines ‘good’?
“What makes a good action? One that furthers the actualization of an agent’s nature, which is to say the good of the agent.”
Ergo, the nature of the agent.
Subtract an o from it and you will find who
The idea that morality is grounded in love rather than rules sounds appealing but it collapses once applied outside personal relationships. Love is subjective and unevenly distributed. People love their family more than strangers, their country more than foreigners. If morality is only love, then preference and bias become virtue. That is no foundation for fairness in law, politics, or daily life.
Rules and duties exist to correct for partiality. The point of justice is that it applies equally, even when love does not. A judge cannot acquit someone because she loves him, a doctor cannot favour a patient because he is charming. Love without principle too easily becomes nepotism or tribalism. The most brutal conflicts in history were driven by deep love for one’s own group, not lack of it.
Love matters for motivation. It can inspire people to act with kindness. But moral frameworks require more than sentiment. They need universality and consistency, which only rules and duties can provide. Murdoch’s vision mistakes a source of energy for the standard itself. Without shared norms, love does not scale beyond the private sphere.
It seems that you are conflating attachment with love, which is often done, but always wrong. They are absolutely not the same thing and are at odds with one another as often as they align, if not more often - as your examples illustrate.
It is possible to hold love for everyone, in any situation, regardless of the circumstances. Of course no one is perfect and so just because something is possible does not mean it always occurs. But this is not the point.
The point is that the origin of morality is love. In the absence of the experience of love, it is possible to approximate the correct behaviours to imitate it, but it is a pale and brittle imitation of real love-derived action and most often descends into immorality under pressure or nuance.
The modern justice system is a fantastic example of this. It doesn't work in any but the most extreme cases - and even then there is an argument to be made against it. Locking people up like animals doesn't improve society or help the offenders. It provides a temporary relief to victims but even that is hollow. Punishing children has been repeatedly shown to be ineffective for correcting behaviour. Why we think adults are different is a simply a lack of love.
The distinction between love and attachment is valid, but it does not solve the problem. Even if one defines love as universal, impartial goodwill, it remains aspirational and fragile. To say morality originates only in love is to assume a capacity that human beings rarely sustain in practice. That is precisely why societies construct rules and duties: to create reliable standards even when love fails.
The justice system is far from perfect, but dismissing it as a “brittle imitation” overlooks what it prevents. Most people are not saints. Universal love may be possible in theory, but history shows that in practice societies without enforceable norms often descend into cycles of revenge, corruption, or rule by the strongest. Systems of law are crude, but they are better than trusting every individual to embody unconditional love.
Rehabilitation and restorative justice models do exist, and they align with the spirit of love by seeking repair rather than punishment. But they are still structured by rules. Without those, there is no guarantee of fairness or safety. Love can inspire moral action, but rules are what make morality workable in communities of imperfect humans.
The issue of love's notorious inconsistency is especially damaging to using it as a foundation of an ethical system. If I acted when I loved something and then decided later on that I didn't love it and would make a different choice, which frame of mind do I use to evaluate the morality of the decision?
Philosophers have pretty much torn love apart as a basis for an ethical framework. It is true we're all very biased and love plays a role in how we perceive but morality has to be based on slightly more objective concepts like fairness, evidence and precedence that we have a chance of evaluating consistently when our feelings change.
Yes. Love is mammal behaviour. I know my hind brain is telling me to love my kids. Do you know your own mind?
The essay goes into this, clearly means love in a different way to how you've taken it, and doesn't exclude the use of rules to codify it:
"Loving attention: a kind of just, patient, generous attention to others. This, she thinks, is what will improve the moral quality of our vision and put us in touch with reality as it truly is. Loving attention, she insists, is central to morality, and that is because it draws us out of ourselves towards the object of love, overcoming our habitual tendency to turn inward."
This conception is simplistic, a straw man, and one that appears to be wholly ignorant of the Cosmopolitan tradition and reasonable criticisms thereof.
Perfect explanation of why love and reason are often opponents. We are humans, we have emotion, but alas not all are aware of their own minds.
if you make it a rule to do the most horrible things to children and women and men and the elderly, would it then be moral?
That would mean harming themselves and everyone they know. Who would agree to that and why? Such a person would not be of sound mind, and fit to be in a position make judgment on these matters.
State your case for this absurd rule. To paraphrase Hitchens, that which is asserted casually can be dismissed casually.
Many people do not have mind. That's why they stab each other with blunt instruments due to "disrespect".
A rule to harm people systematically cannot be moral because it contradicts the very point of morality
but we started with "morality is grounded in rules". what does "grounded in" means then?
how would you define morality?
Morality without rules is arbitrary and unpredictable. The thesis is that morality without rules isn’t workable. Maybe it’s clearer when replacing “rules” by “principles”.