24

Reasons of love
Katrien Schaubroeck

Introduction
Consider the following examples:

1 The friend: “We have spent our summers at the Costa del Sol for years. I don’t care so much
for a beach holiday but because it makes her happy, I enjoy it too.”
2 The sister: “I have to cancel the meeting, I am sorry, my sister just called and she urgently
needs me.”
3 The parent: “One does not need to wait for a special occasion, I like to buy my child a little
something now and then, just because I know he loves presents.”
4 The husband: “Of course I rescued her and not the other person in the water. She is my
wife!”
5 The mother: “I think my son is guilty of the crime he is accused of, but I don’t want him in
jail, so I hide him from the police.”

These self-­reports refer to reasons for an action performed or a choice made. The kind of reasons
invoked can be singled out as reasons of love, the nature and authority of which will be subject of
this chapter. I use love in a broad sense, encompassing at least friendship, love between family
members and romantic love. Reasons of love can recommend many different kinds of actions,
from mundane daily gifts to life-­saving heroic feats. The reasons of love that have preoccupied
philosophers most are the ones that seem to intrude in the moral domain. Sometimes reasons of
love provoke an action that clearly violates a moral norm, like case 5 illustrates. But in fact, as we
will see, some philosophers hold that even in cases 1 to 4 the reasons of love conflict with the
demands of morality. In order to assess the conflict between love and morality, we need to ask at
least two questions: are reasons of love somehow different in nature from moral reasons? And if
they are, is it possible that one kind of reason systematically or sometimes trumps the other kind?
I will use these questions to identify two positions in the debate on reasons of love. The reduction-
ists (as I call them) answer the first question negatively, from which it follows that reasons of love
can never trump reasons of morality because they are not of a different, competing kind. What I
call separatists start from a positive answer to the second question, from which they infer that love
must be thought of as the source of a distinct type of reasons, irreducible to moral reasons.1

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Before spelling out these substantive disagreements I should clarify some terminological
matters. First, the locution “reasons of love” is not a firm, well-­coined term. Some philosophers
use reasons of love and reasons for love interchangeably. Or they prefer to talk about reasons of
intimacy (Jeske 2017) or special obligations (Jeske 2014) when discussing the normative phe-
nomenon illustrated with the five examples above. I will stick to the term “reasons of love” and
I will take it to refer to normative reasons for action that a person has in virtue of loving someone or some-
thing.2 This definition remains neutral about the ultimate ground of those reasons. As we will
see, some philosophers think that reasons of love are not sui generis, and should be considered a
subcategory within a broader and uncontroversial class of reasons, namely those generated by
moral principles. For them, reasons of love are moral reasons that arise under certain circum-
stances defined by love. Other philosophers, however, think that love provides more than cir-
cumstances, and really is a source of reasons to be distinguished from morality as a source of
reasons. According to these philosophers, the fact that one loves someone is not only a condition
that triggers the application of general normative principles; love itself is the source of the
reasons. In other words, it is not just that Romeo’s reason for buying Julio an expensive gift
depends on his love, it is also the case that the attitude of love is in itself sufficient to explain why
this reason comes about. Whether reasons of love are reducible to moral reasons or not is an
important question. My use of the term “the reasons of love” should not be seen as begging the
question by favoring one side in the debate over the other.
The discussion on love’s connection to reasons is, as such, a fairly recent phenomenon in
analytic philosophy (the publication of Harry Frankfurt’s book The Reasons of Love in 2004 is an
important marker). Yet for a long time in history moral philosophers, especially of the conse-
quentialist school, have engaged with reasons of love as a problem for their theory. Well known
is the so-­called nearest and dearest objection to consequentialism, which I discuss in the first section.
I will summarize a line of thought running from Sidgwick to Railton that can serve as a back-
ground and historical context for a contemporary debate between what I call reductionists and
separatists. In the second section I will explain the separatist view, which holds that reasons of
love can trump moral reasons. The third section focuses on the reductionist approach to reasons
of love, according to which the reasons of love are to be found among moral reasons. In the final
section I offer an alternative view that, unlike reductionism, honors the partiality inherent to
reasons of love while avoiding the exaggerated and rigid opposition between love and morality
that motivates separatism.

A Well-­Known Problem for Consequentialism

Reasons of love pose a problem to moral theories. Separatism and reductionism are ways of
solving the problem, as will be explained in the second and third sections. In order to have a
better grasp of the problem, it helps to situate it in a discussion about the demandingness of
morality, which has mainly preoccupied moral consequentialists. The consequentialists I will
discuss in this section are not interested in the phenomenon of reasons of love as such, and they
do not analyze this phenomenon directly as the reductionists and the separatists do. Rather their
goal is to find ways to secure morality’s authority when it is challenged by other forceful sources
of reasons, such as love but also self-­interest.
Henry Sidgwick’s “dualism of practical reason” structured a large part of the 20th-century
debate on normativity and morality. The dualism refers to Sidgwick’s concern about whether
self-­interested reasons and moral duty always coincide, and, if they don’t, what a rational agent
should do. Note that this dual picture completely ignores the possibility of a third source of
reasons besides self-­interest and morality, such as love. Not only does it fail to recognize the

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distinct normative significance of love, it also entails that it is irrational to act out of love if the
action does not serve either morality or self-­interest. Moreover, on the consequentialist under-
standing of morality, endorsed by Sidgwick, it is clear that the friend in case 1 does something
immoral in pleasing his friend. After all, the money spent on a trip to the Costa del Sol could have
been used to generate far more value than the value that consists in the happiness of two friends.
The point generalizes: by consequentialism’s lights it seems that we always act immorally when
we are led by reasons of love. The nearest and dearest objection against consequentialism considers
this implication of the theory a problem. The charge is that consequentialism presents us with a
conception of morality’s demands that is too alienating for normal human beings to accept.
Some consequentialists bite the bullet and hold that indeed it is not right to spend money on
an occasional present for one’s child while people are starving (case 3). Other consequentialists
have tried to make their theory more attuned to common sense. They argue that consequential-
ism does not demand that we cease to favor our loved ones, since many of the loving acts that
we perform are allowed from the moral perspective of an indirect consequentialism. Peter Railton
(1984) has refuted the nearest and dearest objection along these latter lines. I will explain his
solution in more detail because it is a good illustration of the difficulties one can get in when
one tries to make room for love’s reasons within the moral domain. Separatists have detected
these difficulties and reject a solution along Railton’s lines. However, it is important to note that
Railton does not take a stance on the nature of reasons of love, and he therefore does not qualify
as what I call a reductionist either.
Not finding value maximization the most important thing on earth can have overall good
moral effects, argues Railton; he illustrates this observation with the example of Juan and Linda.
This couple is in a commuting marriage, and upon learning that Linda is very sad, Juan wonders
whether he should make an unplanned visit to his wife, thereby using a lot of time, energy and
other resources that could also be devoted to other projects. Railton argues that if we take into
account the whole of Juan’s actions over the course of his life, we might come to see that acting
on a loving disposition will cause Juan, overall, to do more good in life than he would produce
were he to calculate the outcomes of every single action option (1984: 159). Thus, buying
expensive presents for your children or pleasing your friend with a beach holiday can be morally
permissible (as the result of a value-­maximizing disposition) even if the isolated acts do not seem
to maximize value from your deliberative perspective.
Note that, on Railton’s picture, the reasons for why buying one’s child a present is morally
permissible do not appear in the agent’s own deliberation process about what he should do, nor
in the motives he will cite upon being asked why he bought the gift. Juan does not reflect on
whether his loving disposition will have overall good effects. The moral goodness of his loving
disposition and characteristic actions is, on the indirect consequentialist reading, independent of
his personal reasons for flying to his wife. Michael Stocker has famously argued that this incon-
gruence between justification and motivation is a fatal flaw of modern moral theories like con-
sequentialism and Kantian deontology. In “The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories”
(1976) Stocker argues that on a consequentialist as well as on a deontological conception of the
moral good, the reason for which your action is good cannot be the reason for why you do it in
the case of actions of love because that would undermine their meaning as a loving act. He cites
the example of a person paying his ill friend a visit in the hospital. Imagine this person waves his
hand upon being thanked for the visit, saying that he was just doing his duty. And imagine that
he meant it, that he only visited his friend because he thought it was his duty. Surely, Stocker
concludes, this would be disconcerting to the ill friend in bed, and the visit would not be seen
as a sign of friendship anymore, quite to the contrary. On Railton’s indirect consequentialist
picture, the moral agent is not expected to cite the moral justification as a motive, but that does

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not avoid the problem for Stocker: Railton’s moral theory encourages a schizophrenic schism
between motives and justifications. This is a problem, Stocker clarifies, because harmony
between our reasons and our motives, or between the reasons that justify our actions and the
reasons for which we act, is of great importance for a meaningful life. Stocker is naturally driven
toward a defense of separatism, the view according to which it can be justified to disregard
morality and to follow one’s heart, because love is itself a source of reasons that can compete
with moral reasons. Confronted with the near and dear objection, Railton assumes that love is
the victim in need of help and offers a way to recover love’s reasons. But why could we not turn
the table, and ask what saves morality from the demands of love? This question lies at the roots
of separatism and was inspired by a thought experiment by Bernard Williams, as I will explain
in the next section.

Love Versus Morality: Against the Overridingness Thesis

“The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories” was published in 1976. There must have
been something in the air, because the same year Bernard Williams published an article that was
not only equally agenda-­setting as Stocker’s but also setting more or less the same agenda. In
“Persons, Character and Morality” Williams wonders whether morality should be accorded
absolute priority compared to other important ideals or values that agents have. He asks us to
imagine a man who sees two people on the verge of drowning—one of whom is his beloved
wife and the other a stranger—and who believes he can only save one. Imagine the man thinks
to himself: “One of them is my wife and it is permissible in these situations to save one’s wife”
before rescuing her. Would we not be shocked to learn this? Williams accuses the man of having
“one thought too many”: we (and certainly the wife) would hope that the motivating thought
is “that is my wife” (full stop). Worries about impersonal justification seem inappropriate in this
situation and additionally, according to Williams, they reveal the deficiency of the love
relationship.
There have been responses to Williams’ article that flat-­out deny that there is anything
shocking, let alone wrong, about a husband who would consult morality in such a difficult situ-
ation. Thomas Nagel, for example, explains that moral concerns sometimes only become salient
after the deed, but that it does not mean (quite to the contrary) that morality was not also rel-
evant at the time of acting:

The man who plunges into the waves to save his wife will not have Kantian or rule-­
utilitarian arguments running through his head, but that need not prevent him from
having something to say in retrospect, if only to himself, that justifies not having done
anything to inhibit the natural impulse of extreme partiality.
(Nagel 1999: 170)

Nagel’s response seems to me to miss the point. He takes Williams to be making a statement
about normative psychology as if his criticism of deontology and consequentialism was limited to
the statement that these moral theories lead to a psychologically unattractive picture of the moral
mind. I take Williams to make a point not about psychology but about normativity.3 He is
interested in the foundation of reasons for action, and he wonders why morality should always
have the last or decisive word in conflict-­situations. He takes there to be an intrinsic conflict
between the demands of love and the demands of morality, which is not reducible to a momen-
tary conflict of psychologically incompatible states of mind. On this separatist view of love and
morality, loving relationships imply a form of partiality that is simply incompatible with the

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moral standpoint. In other words, the reasons grounded in love are different and even opposed
to reasons that moral concerns give rise to. Therefore, one cannot always be a good lover and a
good moral agent, and more importantly, Williams adds that it can be rational to choose to be
a good lover rather than a good moral agent. This latter claim comes down to a rejection of the
overridingness thesis, which states that moral reasons systematically or necessarily override all other
reasons, including reasons of love.
Williams is not the only one who has rejected the overridingness thesis. Usually the criticism
starts from a daily life example, meant to show how removed the overridingness thesis is from
common sense. Think of the mother hiding her son from the police, of a friend helping his
innocent but unfortunate friend to move a body, of someone covering up her friend’s unfaithful
absence from home. These examples are meant to trigger the intuition that love can trump
morality, or more precisely that it can be rational to do something immoral out of love. In
explaining why that is so, the separatist views differ in interesting ways, although in a sense they
all relate the normative force of love to the importance of self-­preservation.
Susan Wolf (2012), for example, draws on Williams’ concept of “categorical desires” to explain
the normativity of love. Categorical desires are defined by Williams as desires that do not depend
on one’s prospect of being alive, but which rather support the will to stay alive and constitute the
conditions for there being a future self that can have desires at all. For many people, the desires that
are crucial to their lives being worth living are desires that connect them to their loved ones. Thus
we can imagine the husband in our example having a categorical desire to share his life with his
wife. Giving up on that desire would be like giving up on himself, and a fortiori on his capacity to
act as a moral agent. Wolf summarizes Williams’ point as the idea that 

if a person has categorical desires … then it will not make sense for him to be uncon-
ditionally committed to anything that would bind him in advance to acting in a way
that would abandon or betray the object of that desire in certain contexts.
(2012: 88)

Applied to the context of conflicts between (family) love and morality, “it follows that [most
people] will not commit to doing anything it takes to assure that their actions are morally
permissible. Morality will not be more important than their families” (2012: 88). In Williams’
and Wolf ’s opinion, love receives its normative force from the fact that it makes people’s lives
worth living, thus enabling moral and all other actions to be performed by keeping moral agents
alive.
Another interesting and influential defense of what I call separatism is developed in a series
of articles by Jeannette Kennett and Dean Cocking. According to their “drawing view of love,”
people in love relationships are disposed toward mutual direction by one another and interpreta-
tion of one another. The image of friends or lovers influencing one another in their actions, and
in their interpretations of the world and themselves, strikes me as very plausible and rather
uncontroversial. Interestingly, Kennett and Cocking infer from this view of love that the over-
ridingness thesis must be false. The openness toward being influenced by another person is so
essential to love that excluding the possibility that one might do something immoral in being
directed by a friend’s needs or wishes comes down to hampering the friendship from the start.
Taking up a friendship in effect involves taking a risk. Nor is it easy to break up a friendship or
a romantic relationship at the moment the danger becomes real, because intimate relationships
constitute us as agents. On Cocking and Kennett’s relational view of the self and drawing view
of love, it may be rational to act as love demands even if we thereby contradict morality, since
values like self-­preservation and the good of friendship justify these acts of love.

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Love Versus Morality: Morality Is Everywhere

Separatists wonder why it should be thought that morality leads us in all our doings. An answer
along Kantian lines is that there is no alternative. Brook Sadler (2006) provides a clear defense
of this line of thinking. In a nutshell, she argues that although 

[l]ove and friendship do require us to act out of concern for the particular person who
is the friend or beloved … modern moral notions of respect, duty, and obligation can
help us to determine just how to do this.
(2006: 248)

Ethical theories provide us with the necessary conceptual resources for being able to sustain a
loving relationship, Sadler thinks. She exposes a false, and for various reasons unattractive, concep-
tion of love and friendship in the reasoning of separatists (Stocker is her target). They seem to
construe love and friendship as well-­defined social roles with well-­defined expectations, which
makes the rules of friendship implausibly dependent on contingent social norms and which is
moreover false to our experience. We only need to imagine times where we are uncertain about
how to act with regard to a friend or beloved to realize that we naturally engage in moral delibera-
tion in order to figure it out. These situations make clear what is in fact always the case, thinks
Sadler: love sets the stage for one’s action, but moral deliberation provides the reason.
Hence it is not surprising that Sadler doesn’t see anything wrong in a man who’d visit his ill
friend out of duty, nor with the husband who’d let his actions towards his wife be ruled by
moral reflection. If anything, these two imaginary agents ought to be admired, thinks Sadler,
because “they do not blindly trust that love and friendship can be sustained effortlessly, merely
by referring to socially formed roles and expectations, habituated responses, or unexamined feel-
ings” (2006: 253). Although Sadler does not make it explicit, it follows from her argument that
actions performed out of true admirable love cannot be immoral. The motivating idea is that
morality should not only be seen as setting limits to what we are allowed to do from the outside.
Morality also works from the inside, providing input that enables us to think and deliberate
about what the proper course of action would be. For Sadler reasons of love cannot be immoral
because reasons of love, like all other practical reasons, have gone through a moral filter. Sadler
qualifies as a reductionist about reasons of love, because she resists the idea that love would be a
self-­standing source of normative reasons and she denies that love could trump morality. For
her, reasons of love are not sui generis, because they are substantially informed by moral
principles.
The explicit claim that reasons of love are in fact moral reasons can be found in Michael
Smith (2017). He explains that reasons for action that we have in virtue of loving someone can
never trump reasons that we have in virtue of standing in a moral relationship to one another,
because the reasons of love derive from moral principles. In effect, reasons of love are moral
reasons in disguise.4 Take case 2, for example. When my sister calls me in despair, I feel obliged
to help her and break my promise toward colleagues. What moves me is misleadingly called a
reason of love, Smith would say. In fact, the reason derives from a general moral principle that
says that one should fulfill reasonable expectations created. The principle that one should always
fulfill reasonable expectations that one created will apply more often in my dealings with my
sister than with a stranger, but it is the same moral principle that guides our interactions with
rational agents, friends and strangers alike.
Reducing the reasons of love to moral reasons hardly alleviates Williams’ worry. His example
of the drowning wife was meant to shed doubt on the assumption that one ought to treat a

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beloved in accordance with morality. The reply that reasons of love are actually moral reasons
in disguise does not make things better from the separatist point of view. Moreover, don’t we
lose the meaning of a loving act, the partiality that is inherent to love, when we interpret an act
of love as an instantiation of a general moral principle? Do I really understand my own decision
to help my sister as derived from the general moral principle that I should fulfill expectations
created? And what about conflict cases, where both my colleagues and my sister expect some-
thing of me? Or when both my wife and the stranger in the water have contradicting expecta-
tions of me? Probably second-­order expectations could be invoked, like the expectation that
people will meet the expectations of their sister in need rather than the expectations of col-
leagues, but it is not clear what could ground this expectation but a personal experience with
the requirements of love. If that is the case, moral principles are not the ultimate basis for our
deliberations; rather our experience with love is. That love may be more fundamental than
morality is a suggestion I want to explore in the next section. It will lead to an alternative to both
separatism and reductionism.

Beyond the Conflict

Let us take stock and return to the two main questions that structure the debate. One question
is: is there an essential conflict between reasons of love and moral reasons? The second question
is: if there is an intrinsic conflict, can reasons of love trump moral reasons? Philosophers side in
two camps. The reductionists answer the first question negatively. There is no conflict because
reasons of love are also moral in nature. Hence the second question does not arise. Separatists,
on the other side, start from an affirmative answer to the second question. It follows that there
is always the in-­principle possibility of a conflict between reasons of love and moral reasons.
Separating the domain of love from the domain of morality follows logically from a rejection of
the overridingness thesis.
Despite the deep waters between them, separatists and reductionists have something in
common: they start out from a clear, determinate view of what morality requires, and they
consider impartiality to be a key feature of morality. While the two camps in the debate work
with a fixed idea of what morality is, I wonder why we could not turn certainties upside
down and interpret love as a guide to explore morality. Let us look at case 4 again. The
example is at the heart of a classic paper by Susan Wolf, “Morality and Partiality,” in which
she argues that, even on a moderate understanding of impartiality, reasons of love cannot
always be subsumed under a moral umbrella. According to a moderate understanding of
impartiality (which Wolf contrasts with and prefers over an extreme form of impartiality
which need not concern us here), a moral person acts only in ways she believes any reasonable
person would allow, and she holds herself to the same standards that she expects of others.
Some indeterminacy is welcomed and unavoidable, thinks Wolf. She gives the example of
someone who lets a friend sneak through the turnstile as he collects tickets for a Bruce Spring-
steen concert (1992: 251). Wolf herself finds this permissible: she could imagine doing this
herself while allowing others to do the same under the same circumstances (that is, as long as
they only do it once, and for a very good friend who could not afford a ticket etcetera). But
when it comes to the mother who hides her son from the police, Wolf seems to think that
there is no way to describe this action as morally permissible and universalizable. Yet, it seems
to me that one could imagine that the mother in the example allows other mothers to do
exactly the same, meeting the standard of moderate impartiality. Wolf does not consider this
possibility because she takes the more important point to be that the mother isn’t worried
about morality or universalizability at all. 

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After all, if the meaning of one’s life and one’s very identity is bound up with someone
as deeply as a mother’s life is characteristically tied to her son’s, why should the dictates
of impartial morality be regarded as decisive?
(1992: 253)

In some cases, Wolf wants to show, morality is just not that important, and in these cases acting
immorally can be the rational thing to do.
I agree that in the described case love offers very strong reasons, but when we spell out those
reasons in more detail we find out some features of those reasons that suggest an affinity rather than
a clear-­cut opposition between love and morality. For example, we realize that reasons of love
cannot be of an egoistic nature such as that the mother cannot bear the thought of being home
alone. In order for the mother’s decision to count as an act of love, she must do it out of conviction
that she is helping her son, and doing it for his sake. In this way, trying to understand the example’s
intuitive appeal reveals that the motive of love bears similarity to the motive of respect and concern
for someone’s well-­being that we are used to characterize as moral motives.
An important reason why Wolf prefers to characterize the mother’s dilemma as a square
conflict between morality on one side and the demands of love on the other, rather than a
dilemma in which different, uncategorizable concerns compete, suggests itself upon reflection
on Wolf ’s entire oeuvre: perhaps she is not open to the idea that an action out of love can coin-
cide with a moral action because of her strict and strained conception of moral agency, as it is
most clearly depicted in her article “Moral Saints” (1982). Wolf describes moral saints as irritat-
ing, obsessive and bland. But, as Vanessa Carbonell has argued convincingly, what makes the
characters in Wolf ’s article irritating is that they care “more about the description of their actions
as right than about the right-­making features of the actions themselves” (Carbonell 2009: 395).
Real-­life moral saints, however, are not worried about, let alone obsessed by, their moral repu-
tation, nor about the moral goodness of their concern. Rather they are concerned about the
poor, the sick, the downtrodden, to which they direct their energy and resources spontaneously.
Carbonell writes:

[Wolf] seems to think that a moral saint must be motivated by “morality itself ” under
that description, as an abstract concept, rather than being motivated directly by those
things in the world that the concept picks out, like the relief of suffering.
(2009: 390)

This analysis of “Moral Saints” as based on a failure to distinguish between motivation de dicto
from motivation de re seems right. More importantly, Wolf owns up to it when she, in her later
article on the one thought too many example, explains why she would not want herself or her
husband to be unconditionally committed to morality (or, to be moral saints): 

[T]he hope that a person not be absolutely and unconditionally committed to morality
is not the same as, nor does it imply a hope that, he sometimes behaves immorally. It
is no part of my wish that my husband or I ever do anything morally impermissible.
My objection or distaste is for the idea of an absolute, unconditional commitment to
morality, not with the actions that such a commitment would command.
(Wolf 2012: 80)

Thus when Wolf says that morality need not be the most important thing in life, and that an
unconditional commitment to morality is not rational, she thinks of the unattractiveness of

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someone who commits himself/herself to moral principles rather than to the morally good
actions themselves. The equation of moral attitudes with moralistic attitudes (as I would call this
commitment to a moral ideal qua moral ideal) drives her resistance against moral saints as well
as her admiration for an agent who places love above morality.
Not only Wolf but all the participants in the debate mentioned so far work with a fixed idea
of what morality is about, and they assume that a conception of morality can be clear and com-
plete before love enters the scene. Michael Smith knows what moral principles are such that
loving actions fall under them; for Sadler, morality offers the secure and firm guidance that
lovers need, since the requirements of love can be indeterminate or vague. Separatists give more
credit to love, but even they work with a fixed view of what moral actions are such that they
are positive that actions justified by love like the actions of the hiding mother or the husband-­
savior are immoral.
But could we not interpret the cases of the mother and the husband as challenges to what
morality requires? Could we not see these cases as possibly leading us toward morality rather than
away from it? Could love and the reasons it gives rise to not be seen as a guide to explore
morality and its complexity, rather than as an enemy of it? In exploring this alternative to sepa-
ratism and reductionism, I take my lead from three philosophers who have written about love
from different perspectives: Jay Wallace, Troy Jollimore and Raymond Gaita.
In “Duties of Love” Wallace attacks the reductionist account of duties of love (accounts that
interpret duties of love as moral duties in disguise), which he claims to be on unstable grounds.
He writes:

The reductionist supposes that we might be able to make sense of moral obligations,
even if there are no non-­derivative duties of love. It is not really clear, however, that
we can understand the notion of obligation if we are prepared to deny that there can
be obligations that arise directly from our relationships with those we love.
(2012: 192)

Wallace believes that relationships of love provide the paradigmatic understanding of the notion
of obligation, without which moral obligations cannot be understood. His defense depends on
the thought that the very notion of being under an obligation requires a relational under-
standing. In order to accept the idea that one’s agency can be legitimately constrained by obliga-
tions, we must think of obligations as conceptually connected to claims that other people have
on us. And since relationships of love are the most familiar and extensive contexts for the
application of constraint by other people’s claims, they provide the most compelling examples
of relational obligations.
Duties of love cannot be moral duties in disguise, Wallace’s argument goes, because we
cannot have a firm grip on the concept of moral obligation without knowing love. I find Wal-
lace’s assumption that we need experience with love in order to know what moral obligations
(in their form of relational obligations) are very intuitive. But I am not sure that Wallace’s expla-
nation for why that is so goes to the heart of the matter. Wallace thinks that duty is the connect-
ing factor between love and morality. But clearly what he says also applies to reasons of love. The
relationship between lovers in virtue of which they have certain responsibilities toward one
another is also the source of reasons which we might not want to call duties. The love for his
friend does not particularly oblige the person in case 1 to go to the Costa del Sol, but love is the
source of a (strong) reason to do so. The thoughtful parent in case 3 does not have a duty to buy
presents for his child, but he does experience love as the source of his reasons for doing so. Love
provides us with the experience of the enjoyment of doing something for the sake of another

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person. It is this experience rather than the experience of being under a duty that makes love,
in my eyes, an ally or maybe even a forerunner rather than an enemy of morality. I therefore
want to suggest an alternative explanation of the connection between love and morality. There
is a minimal story and a full-­fledged story. The minimal story says that love is an enabling con-
dition of moral agency, and I will invoke Troy Jollimore to explain this. On the full-­fledged
story, that I can only hint at by summarizing a striking passage from Raymond Gaita’s A Common
Humanity, love is not only the beginning but also the end that moral agents strive at.
In his exposition of the “vision theory of love” (according to which love instantiates a way of
looking at the world: a way of seeing another person as special, unique and valuable, while at
the same time seeing the world from his or her point of view) Troy Jollimore draws attention
to the similarity between the standpoint of love and the standpoint of morality. He writes: “The
sort of focused and devoted attention involved in love is a profoundly moral phenomenon
insofar as it both enables and takes as its goal the full, unrestricted recognition of a human indi-
vidual” (2011: 170). He illustrates the claim with a reflection on the significance of grief. The
death of each person is a deep and tragic loss, but it is only when a loved one dies that we
respond with the full recognition of what has happened. If we felt the magnitude of the loss
every time someone died, we could not function anymore. Yet the reality of these psychological
limits should not blind us from the reality of the moral value of every individual’s life. Love
channels our attention to the unique value of a person and thus “opens a window on reality,
allowing us to experience and to feel that from which we are ordinarily alienated, and thus, pro-
tected” (2011: 170). I call love an enabling condition of morality in the sense that it provides a
firm experience with recognizing the individuality of another being, to be repeated in other less
obvious contexts. For this minimal story to work it is not necessary that one should love someone
before one is able to treat him in a morally correct way. That would be too demanding. The
point is more general and connects capacities rather than particular cases: without the experience
of love we would not know what morality is about, let alone be able to behave morally.
The full-­fledged story has it that love is not only the beginning but also the end of morality.
Love is the ideal that we should strive for when interacting with other people. We can find an
evocation of the full-­fledged story in Raymond Gaita’s monograph A Common Humanity, where
he relates an episode from his own time as a nurse in a psychiatric clinic. The patients at the
hospital were judged to be incurable and were so severely afflicted that their human value was
almost invisible. They had ceased to receive visits from friends, spouses, children and even
parents; often they were treated brutishly by the psychiatrists and the nurses. A small number of
psychiatrists, however, worked devotedly to improve their condition, and they spoke “against
all appearances, of the inalienable dignity of even those patients.” One day a nun came to the
ward, and everything in her demeanor toward the patients, writes Gaita, 

the way she spoke to them, her facial expressions, the inflexions of her body—­
contrasted with and showed up the behaviour of those noble psychiatrists. She showed
that they were, despite their best efforts, condescending, as I too had been. She thereby
revealed that even such patients were, as the psychiatrists and I had sincerely and
generously professed, the equals of those who wanted to help them; but she also
revealed that in our hearts we did not believe this.
(2002: 18–19)

The nun displayed love toward fellow human beings who were not only complete strangers but
also almost non-­recognizable as fellow human beings—in other words, beings that were very
hard to love. Gaita sees in this unconditional love the mark of the saint, although I don’t think

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that the religious connotation is necessary. There is something morally superior in these extra-
ordinary kind and considerate reactions, as they emanate from a vision of other people as unique
individuals worthy of love. It is an ideal for all of us, I’d like to think, and not only a possibility
for the faithful among us.

Conclusion
I believe that the arguments by Wallace, Jollimore and Gaita, even in the very short versions
presented, show, each in their own way, that the conflict between love and morality is not as
structural and deep as Williams and Wolf think. Nor does bridging the gap require moralizing
the reasons of love like Smith and Sadler do. When the mother wants to help her guilty son, she
does not present this action under the category of “things that my son can reasonably expect
from me.” There are no universal principles guiding her. She acts out of personalized concern
for this particular individual whom she loves. Yet, I do not see why that, in itself, disqualifies
her action as bearing any moral significance or value. What I would expect from a loving
mother is that she realizes that her son’s victim was someone’s beloved too, that the victim’s
mother is in pain and deserves justice. If she realizes that, but also believes that her son will suffer
and might not have a fair trial (for example), it may be rational of her to hide him from the
police, the moral permissibility of which can be a matter for discussion. But it is important to
recognize that her love need not prevent her from taking up the moral standpoint but might
precisely move her toward it. That love is compatible with morality and even supportive of it
strikes me as obvious when we consider the other key example we have been talking about (case
4). Wolf (2012) confesses that she wants her husband not to be concerned about morality when
he has the choice between doing what is morally right and rescuing her. If I think about my
own preference, I also want a husband who saves me, and who does not have to deliberate about
that, but, in an important addition to Wolf ’s expectations, I would also want my husband to be
sad and deeply sorry that the situation was such that he could not also save the other person who
is someone else’s beloved.
Does it follow from my preference that I think morality can be overridden by love? I don’t
think so, insofar as the overridingness thesis assumes a clear-­cut distinction between two types
of reasons, or two types of attitudes. Of course there can be practical conflicts because of lack of
time and lack of resources, but the attitudes in essence are akin. The position thus sketched is
less vulnerable than separatism to the objection of egocentricity. Remember that Williams,
Wolf, Kennett and Cocking hold that it can be rational to do something immoral because in
some cases, doing what is morally required would result in a life void of meaning. The objection
of egocentricity questions the assumed importance of sticking to our lives and our selves (“So
what, if an agent would lose his identity by doing the right thing? Perhaps there is something
wrong with this identity to start with!”). In my suggested alternative view what justifies an agent
acting for reasons of love is not that he would otherwise lose his identity, but that without love
he would not know what morality is about. It is because the husband knows how important his
wife is that he realizes the enormous loss of the unfortunate partner of the person he was not
able to save.5

Notes
1 I borrow the distinction from Jay Wallace (2012) although he does not use the term separatism. How
he defines reductionism is slightly different from my definition in that he takes it to be a position about
duties of love whereas I also apply it to reasons of love. This is how he describes reductionism about

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duties of love: “there are no genuine duties of love, only moral duties that people have to each other
in virtue of certain generalizable features of their loving relationships” (2012: 175).
2 Note that I limit the scope to actions, although it is arguable that love also yields reasons to feel certain
emotions or have certain beliefs. Keller (2007) and Jollimore (2011), for example, focus on the episte-
mological reasons grounded in love.
3 I side with Wolf (2012) who writes in her interpretation of the Williams article: “I shall argue that the
[one thought too many] passage should lead us to question not only the model of moral agency that
would involve constant attention to the question of moral permissibility, it should lead us to question
the model of moral agency that would require unconditional commitment to acting within the bounds
of what morality permits” (2012: 75).
4 To be precise, Smith believes that love gives rise to both desire-­based reasons and respect-­based
reasons, of which only the latter are moral reasons. The reasons that interest us here qualify as respect-­
based reasons of love in Smith’s terminology.
5 I would like to thank Sara Protasi, Esther Kroeker, Adrienne Martin and the participants of the
Antwerp Ethics Research Seminar for their valuable feedback.

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