New Philosophical Essays on Love and

Loving 1st ed. 2021 Edition Simon

Cushing (Editor)
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/new-philosophical-essays-on-love-and-loving-1st-ed-
2021-edition-simon-cushing-editor/
New Philosophical
Essays on
Love and Loving
Edited by Simon Cushing
New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving
 Simon Cushing
Editor

New Philosophical
Essays on Love and
Loving
Editor
Simon Cushing
University of Michigan–Flint
Flint, MI, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-72323-1    ISBN 978-3-030-72324-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72324-8

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: © Sergio Amiti / Getty Images

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To Thomas and Frederick, because some love is simple and obvious. Jami too,
even though she doesn’t believe in the stuff
 Contents

1 Introduction  1
Simon Cushing

2 Making Room for Love in Kantian Ethics 25

Ernesto V. Garcia

3 Iris Murdoch and the Epistemic Significance of Love 39

Cathy Mason

4 ‘Love’ as a Practice: Looking at Real People 63

Lotte Spreeuwenberg

5 Love, Choice, and Taking Responsibility 87

Christopher Cowley

6 Not All’s Fair in Love and War: Toward Just Love Theory101
Andrew Sneddon

7 Doubting Love125
Larry A. Herzberg

8 Love and Free Agency151

Ishtiyaque Haji

vii
viii CONTENTS

9 Sentimental Reasons171
Edgar Phillips

10 Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Enticing Reasons for Love195

N. L. Engel-Hawbecker

11 Love, Motivation, and Reasons: The Case of the

Drowning Wife215
Monica Roland

12 Can Our Beloved Pets Love Us Back?241

Ryan Stringer

13 Romantic Love Between Humans and AIs: A Feminist

Ethical Critique269
Andrea Klonschinski and Michael Kühler

14 Patriotism and Nationalism as Two Distinct Ways of

Loving One’s Country293
Maria Ioannou, Martijn Boot, Ryan Wittingslow, and
Adriana Mattos

Index315
 Notes on Contributors

Martijn Boot is an assistant professor at the University of Groningen.

Prior to coming to Groningen, he was an associate professor at Waseda
University in Tokyo, Japan. He holds a DPhil from the University of
Oxford. He specializes in political philosophy. His book, titled
Incommensurability and Its Implications for Practical Reasoning, Ethics
and Justice (2017), is the result of research on incommensurability of val-
ues and its implications for justice.
Christopher Cowley is an associate professor in the School of Philosophy,
University College Dublin, Ireland. He is the author of two books (includ-
ing Moral Responsibility, 2013) and has edited three volumes (including
The Philosophy of Autobiography, 2015, and Supererogation, 2015). He
specializes mainly in ethics, with a side interest in the philosophy of crim-
inal law.
Simon Cushing is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The University of
Michigan–Flint. He co-edited The Philosophy of Autism (2012) with Jami
L. Anderson, and edited Heaven and Philosophy (2017). His interviews
with leading philosophers can be found at https://www.cognethic.org/
philosophical-­profiles.
N. L. Engel-Hawbecker is a doctoral candidate at The University of
Texas at Austin.
Ernesto V. Garcia is an assistant professor in the Philosophy Department
at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He works mainly on history
of modern philosophy (especially Hume and Kant) and contemporary

ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

moral and political philosophy, and he has published on various topics

including forgiveness, authenticity, and respect for persons.
Ishtiyaque Haji is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Calgary.
He has research interests in ethical theory, philosophy of action, meta-
physics, and philosophical psychology. He is the author of Moral
Appraisability (1998), Deontic Morality and Control (2002), Moral
Responsibility, Authenticity, and Education (with Stefaan Cuypers;
2008), Freedom and Value (2009), Incompatibilism’s Allure (2009),
Reason’s Debt to Freedom (2012), Luck’s Mischief (2016), and The
Obligation Dilemma (2019).
Larry A. Herzberg is Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Wisconsin, Oshkosh, where he teaches courses on epistemology, the phi-
losophy of emotion, and the philosophy of language (among others).
Since earning his PhD in philosophy from UCLA in 2003, he has pub-
lished articles focusing on issues in the philosophy of emotion and the
epistemology of self-knowledge, including “Constitutivism, Belief and
Emotion” (2008), “Causation, Direction, and Appraisal Theories of
Emotion” (2009), “To Blend or to Compose: A Debate About Emotion
Structure” (2012), “On Knowing How I Feel About That: A Process-­
Reliabilist Analysis” (2016), “Can Emotional Feelings Represent
Significant Relations?” (2018), and “On Sexual Lust as an Emotion”
(2019). He is currently exploring epistemological issues related to the
internet.
Maria Ioannou has been an assistant professor at the University of
Groningen since 2016. She holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford
with a specialization in social psychology. Her research lies in the field of
intergroup conflict, prejudice, and intergroup contact. Prior to her
appointment at the University of Groningen, she worked as a post-
doctoral researcher at the University of Cyprus as well as a researcher
in the civil society sector conducting research on social cohesion and
reconciliation.
Andrea Klonschinski is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department
of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine, Göttingen University
(Germany). She works in the field of moral philosophy and philosophy of
economics. Her research focuses especially on the ethics of discrimination,
well-being measures, and on women in philosophy. She is the author of
the book The Economics of Resource Allocation in Health Care: Cost-Utility,
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi

Social Value, and Fairness (2016). From 2012 until 2020, she organized
the philosophical movie series Filmisches Philosophieren, in which philo-
sophical aspects of popular movies are discussed with the audience.
Michael Kühler is a Research and Teaching Fellow at the Academy for
Responsible Research, Teaching, and Innovation (ARRTI) at Karlsruhe
Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, as well as “Privatdozent”
(roughly equaling associate professor) at the University of Münster,
Germany. He has studied philosophy, musicology, and pedagogy and got
his doctoral degree in philosophy at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg,
Germany, in 2005, with a thesis on the intertwined problem of moral jus-
tification and motivation. In 2012, he completed his “habilitation” at the
University of Münster, Germany, with a monograph on the principle
“ought implies can.” His areas of expertise include ethics, metaethics,
political philosophy, and the philosophy of love. He has several publica-
tions on the philosophy of love. Most recently, he co-edited (together
with Rachel Fedock and Raja Rosenhagen) the volume Love, Justice, and
Autonomy, Routledge, 2021.
Cathy Mason is Stipendiary Lecturer in Philosophy at Wadham College,
University of Oxford, supervising students in ethics, practical ethics, the-
ory of politics, and aesthetics. Her research is focused on ethics, episte-
mology (especially moral epistemology), aesthetics, and the writing of Iris
Murdoch (particularly at the points in her work where these topics con-
verge). In the summer of 2019, she completed her PhD in Philosophy,
titled Neglected Virtues: Love, Hope, and Humility, at Trinity College,
Cambridge, under the supervision of Paulina Sliwa and Tom Dougherty.
Adriana Mattos is Lecturer in Health and Life Sciences at the University
of Groningen. She holds a PhD in Medical and Pharmaceutical Sciences
(2013) from the University of Groningen. Her thesis was focused on the
effects of targeted delivery of interleukin-10 to the fibrotic liver. She also
has experience in parasitology and tropical diseases.
Edgar Phillips is a postdoctoral researcher in the Institut Jean Nicod at
the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris and an affiliate member of the
Thumos research group at the University of Geneva. He works in the phi-
losophy of mind, philosophy of action, and ethics. He gained his PhD in
Philosophy at University College London in 2018.
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Monica Roland holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Oslo,

where she was an affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature
(CSMN). Her main research interests are the philosophy of love (and
more generally the philosophy of emotions), normativity and the
nature of reasons, rationality (and its relation to irrationality), phi-
losophy of science, and feminism. In her dissertation What Is Love?
(2016) she defends the claim that love is a moral emotion, as well as
a response to reasons that justify the emotion. She currently works at
Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet) as a senior advisor.
Andrew Sneddon is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the
University of Ottawa. He studies ethics and philosophical psychology. His
books include Autonomy (2013) and Like-Minded: Externalism and Moral
Psychology (2011).
Lotte Spreeuwenberg is researching love, ethics, and moral psychology
at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. She is writing her doctoral dis-
sertation Against the Fat Relentless Ego: Love at the Centre of Morality,
with Iris Murdoch as an overarching author. Besides publishing on love in
academic journals, she spends a great deal of her time writing public phi-
losophy, with a focus on activism. With Martha Claeys, she produces and
hosts the philosophy podcast Kluwen, which aims at showing that philoso-
phy deserves life beyond academia.
Ryan Stringer is a crazy cat-lover who earned his PhD in Philosophy
from the University of California San Diego in 2019 after completing and
defending his dissertation, The Nature and Normativity of Love and
Friendship. Besides the philosophy of love and friendship, he specializes in
metaethics, normative ethics, and moral philosophy in general. He is cur-
rently teaching at Purdue University for the Cornerstone Program.
Ryan Wittingslow is an assistant professor at the University of Groningen,
and holds a PhD in art history and philosophy from the University of
Sydney (2014). Most of his research sits at the intersection of aesthetics,
philosophy of technology, and philosophy of design. He also has devastat-
ing opinions about art.
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Simon Cushing

1.1   I Want to Know What Love Is

Love has been a topic of interest to philosophy since at least the time of
Plato’s Symposium, but with a few notable exceptions, it was unduly
neglected in the twentieth century, at least by writers in the analytic tradi-
tion that predominates in the English-speaking world. However, in the
past quarter century, writing on the topic has exploded. In this volume, we
touch on most of the currently hot debates and also introduce some fasci-
nating tangents. The main threads of discussion reflected in this volume
are as follows: the relationship between love and morality (is it adversarial,
congenial, or are they in fact co-dependent?); whether love is rational,
subject to reasons for or against it, or a force that is not under our inten-
tional control; and whether love affects the way we perceive the world or
the way we value things in the world (and whether this is a good thing).
More singular topics include: whether love would be affected by disputes
in the literature on free will; whether we could be mistaken about being in
love; whether our pets are capable of loving us back; whether a relation-
ship of the kind shown in the movie her between a human and an artificial

S. Cushing (*)
University of Michigan–Flint, Flint, MI, USA
e-mail: simoncu@umich.edu

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
S. Cushing (ed.), New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72324-8_1
2 S. CUSHING

intelligence could be either loving or ethical; and whether the difference

between patriotism and nationalism hinges on how each instances a differ-
ent kind of love (and what that says about each of those “isms”). Along
the way we will see analyses of the work of philosophical greats like
Immanuel Kant as well as the work of more contemporary writers, in par-
ticular Iris Murdoch, and philosophers actively engaged in the current
revival, notably Harry Frankfurt, J. David Velleman, and Niko Kolodny.

1.2   (If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want

to Be Right

Love and morality may seem to be independent of each other, and often
even at odds. Othello, having murdered his beloved Desdemona out of
jealousy, says that he is “one that lov’d not wisely but too well,” implying
that love is a force that can propel one to commit monstrous acts. For a
more recent fictional example, think of Jaime Lannister pushing Bran
Stark out of a window while muttering, “The things I do for love.” The
fact that morality requires us to be impartial while love is very much partial
is at the core of the apparent tension. The influential post-war British phi-
losopher Bernard Williams is responsible for probably the most cited dis-
cussion of an illustration of the potential clash. He quotes Charles Fried’s
discussion of a man confronted with the choice of only being able to save
one of two drowning people, one of whom is the man’s own wife. Fried
argues that the man can be morally justified in saving his wife over a
stranger, but Williams bemoans even the need to give moral justification
for his partiality.

[T]he idea that moral principle can legitimate his preference, yielding the
conclusion that in situations of this kind it is at least all right (morally per-
missible) to save one’s wife… provides the agent with one thought too
many: it might have been hoped by some (for instance, by his wife) that his
motivating thought, fully spelled out, would be the thought that it was his
wife…. [T]he point is that somewhere (and if not in this case, where?) one
reaches the necessity that such things as deep attachments to other persons
will express themselves in the world in ways which cannot at the same time
embody the impartial view, and that they also run the risk of offending
against it. (Williams 1981: 18)
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

As we shall see, this case and Williams’ phrase “one thought too many”
have proved to be quite a touchstone in contemporary discussion. Williams
provides the basis for arguing that love itself provides reasons that not only
do motivate us independently of morality, but should do so, even in cases
of apparent conflict. This is a theme we shall see revisited in several papers
in this collection. However, many philosophers down the ages have argued
that, to the contrary, love and morality are intertwined, that you cannot
have one without the other. So we have two camps: one promoting love
as a force independent of morality and in some senses deserving to win out
over it in the battle to motivate action; the other arguing that they march
in sync and should not be seen as at odds. Confusingly, both camps can
cite the work of Immanuel Kant, usually held up as the greatest of the
modern philosophers, and certainly among the most influential ethicists,
for support for their position. On the one hand, Kant’s ethics are notori-
ously demanding: he argues for a system of exceptionless rules and con-
tends that one’s action only has moral worth if one acts out of duty,
prompted by one’s rational nature. This does not seem like a conception
of morality that would have room for love as we typically conceive of it: for
Kant, if one were to help a loved one simply because one loved them, this
would not count as a moral act. However, two of contemporary philoso-
phy’s most influential defenders of “love as a moral emotion” are explicitly
influenced by Kant. The first of these is Iris Murdoch, who was a philoso-
pher before she became known for her novels (and for being the subject of
the 2001 film Iris), whose work is the main subject of two chapters in this
collection. The other, whose work is cited in just about every chapter in
this volume, is J. David Velleman. He writes:

We have made a mistake… as soon as we accept the assumption of a conflict

in spirit. Love is a moral emotion precisely in the sense that its spirit is closely
akin to that of morality. (Velleman 1999: 341)

Because Velleman’s work has been so influential on the philosophy of

love of the past twenty-odd years, I will take a moment to outline his
view. In his initial essay, Velleman took particular issue with what he saw
as an emerging orthodoxy that love was a drive. Much of love’s bad
moral reputation, he argued, could be traced to Freud, who presented
love as a drive that all too often was based on misperception of its object.
Contemporary analytic philosophers followed Freud in presenting love
as a “syndrome of motives” with an aim, primarily desires directed
4 S. CUSHING

toward the beloved, typically to be with, to benefit, to please, or to be

well thought of by them. Instead of this, Velleman conceives of love as a
way of perceiving a loved one:

A sense of wonder at the vividly perceived reality of another person is, in my

view, the essence of love. (Velleman 2008: 199)

Velleman argues that love exactly parallels Kantian respect: for Kant, the
ultimate directive of ethics (the Categorical Imperative) insists that we
respect the personhood of others such that they must be regarded as
sources of value and never used as a means to one’s own ends. Kant argues
that respect for another acts as a check on one’s own tendencies to want
to exploit things in the world around one. Where respect is the mandated
minimum attitude toward other persons, love, claims Velleman, is an
optional maximum attitude, and love arrests our tendencies toward emo-
tional self-protection, leaving us vulnerable to the objects of our love. This
vulnerability can lead us to appreciate our beloved’s features so that we
may say that we love their crooked smile, but this does not mean that we
love them for their crooked smile (which creates all kinds of problems for
other theorists who do claim this, as we shall see), but rather we love the
smile because it is “an expression or symbol or reminder” of the beloved’s
value as a person. Velleman also stresses that while love is an attitude of
valuing another, it is not one that compares them to others. To love com-
paratively is to put a price on what we value, such that it can be replaced
by something of equal or greater value. But love does not rank beloveds
any more than parents rank their children. Again drawing on Kant,
Velleman argues that the kind of value that persons have is incomparable
because it responds to their dignity, not to a price. This, he says, is the
solution to the paradox that anyone equally may be loved, but the love for
each is uniquely special. Love is a moral emotion, just as respect is, because
it is a response to the dignity of persons. Evidence of its moral influence is
that it is the means by which moral lessons are first taught to children and
by which the moral sensibilities of adults can be (re)enlivened (Velleman
2008: 201). But perhaps most importantly, love is the emotion that makes
us care about the good of another, makes us work to ensure their flourish-
ing. Thus it is that we may end up desiring to help them, not because love
itself is that desire, but because wanting to help them is a natural result of
the vulnerability to them that itself comes from “really seeing” them (to
use a phrase Velleman borrows from Murdoch).
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

Another philosopher who offers a Kantian take on a phenomenon one

might have thought outside of the moral sphere is Neera Kapur Badhwar,
who argues that the only way to make sense of the fact that true friendship
(and love) must be constant through changes in personality and feeling is
to locate that friendship not in a response to any contingent, inconstant
features of one’s friend or lover, but in their humanity (Badhwar 1989).
Velleman’s conception of love and Badhwar’s of friendship are overtly
influenced by Kant, but are they pictures that Kant himself would recog-
nize or endorse? In Chap. 2, “Making Room for Love in Kantian Ethics,”
Ernesto Garcia explores this question.
First, Garcia points out that Kant actually discusses love in writings
other than the ethical works that influence the two contemporary think-
ers. Kant makes a distinction between moral and non-moral (or natural)
love, which he calls love as a passion. While both dispose us to help others,
they can be distinguished both by what aspects of our nature motivate
them (rational or “sensible”) and whether or not each can be morally
required of us (the former can, because it is a moral obligation, while the
latter cannot, because it is a contingent feeling, and thus not under our
voluntary control). If moral love sounds strange, Kant argues that in fact
it is the only way to understand the passages of the New Testament that
command us to love our neighbors and enemies, for non-moral love can-
not be commanded. Kant also makes a parallel distinction between types
of friendship, except that moral friendship also incorporates moral love.
Now, with this distinction in Kant, it appears that he has acknowledged
that there is a legitimate form of love that is non-moral, and that perhaps
his moral love is a specialized kind, a religious ideal. Has Velleman, in
arguing that love of the kind that we might feel for our children and our
partners is fundamentally a moral attitude, conflated the two loves?
A problem for Kantian moral love is that it must be truly universal: we
are required, after all, to love even our enemies. The love that Velleman
and Badhwar want to defend, however, is the actual, partial (in the sense
of “not impartial,” rather than “incomplete”) love we feel for a select few
individuals. How can Velleman and Badhwar explain this partiality on our
parts? Badhwar argues that it is not the humanity that is found within
every person that our friendship responds to but rather the empirical per-
sonhood of concrete historical individuals. Velleman argues that the love
he is defending is optional (unlike the minimum required attitude of
respect), and its reasons can be particular. But what it is is a disarming of
emotional defenses in response to the incomparable and non-instrumental
6 S. CUSHING

value of another human being. Garcia concludes that, on the one hand,
the modern Kantians’ accounts of love are improvements on Kant’s own
“moral love,” because we find the notion of loving someone out of duty
counterintuitive, and the modern Kantians place the focus of love in the
right place, that is, on the people who are the objects of our love and
friendship. However, Garcia argues that what Kant gets right is in separat-
ing love out into kinds, at least one of which is non-moral. Tackling
Velleman’s account in particular, Garcia argues that it is open to a strong
and a weak reading. The weak reading is trivially true (love involves mak-
ing oneself emotionally vulnerable to another who is a being worthy of
moral respect) but does not show that love is moral. The strong reading,
on the other hand, which requires that we love someone because of our
knowledge of them as a moral agent, is neither sufficient for love (it is
equally true of appealing for help, mercy, or friendship) nor necessary (one
can love another romantically without viewing them as a moral agent).
Garcia concludes by agreeing with Berit Brogaard that there is not a single
kind of love, and while Velleman-style moral love might indeed be one
kind of love, there are others, and others of value.

1.3   The Look of Love

Before Velleman, and in fact influencing his argument for love as a moral
emotion, was the British philosopher-turned-novelist, Iris Murdoch,
whose work is undergoing something of a revival. Cathy Mason’s chapter
presents both an argument in support of her account and a critical evalua-
tion of writers who, while inspired by Murdoch, have abandoned what
Mason takes to be core parts of Murdoch’s view. A primary motivation for
Murdoch’s writing was that the dominant behaviorist approach of mid-­
twentieth-­century philosophy ignored a vital kind of moral activity that
was purely internal. Prior to any action that can be deemed of moral
worth, we must, argued Murdoch, practice attention, a fundamentally
moral attitude to the world that is a kind of love. This attitude has an epis-
temic aspect: only through viewing the world with love can one achieve a
true understanding of reality, and it is this process of attending to the
world in a loving way that is itself a moral activity. In a key example,
Murdoch describes how a mother-in-law (M) with an initial dislike of her
son’s wife (D) manages to revise her view after “looking again.” In so
doing, not only does she arrive at a truer picture of reality, she herself is
improved by the process. While contemporary writers defending love as a
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

moral attitude have been influenced by Murdoch, Mason argues that they
do not do full justice to important elements of her view. For example,
Velleman’s view of love as an appreciation of the moral personhood of
another that requires “really seeing” one’s beloved departs from Murdoch’s
approach both because Murdoch, unlike Velleman, insists that love is mor-
ally necessary, and not merely optional, and because, for her, it is the con-
crete particularity of an individual that love focuses on, not the rational
will that every person instantiates equally, as in Velleman’s account.
Mason also considers Mark Hopwood’s sympathetic exegetical work on
Murdoch (Hopwood 2014, 2017) and finds that while it acknowledges
Murdoch’s view of the particularity of the subject of love and describes an
epistemic role for love, that role is not the one Murdoch intended.
Hopwood says love reveals normative demands on the lover, but, Mason
contends, Murdoch insists that love’s role is primarily to reveal facts about
the person being loved. Furthermore, the facts revealed by the loving gaze
are both objectively real and unable to be captured in the supposedly
value-neutral language of science. Murdoch, argues Mason, views love as
a character trait, as, in fact, a virtue, alongside those studied by the ancient
Greeks, including courage and wisdom, and like those character features,
love is a reliable sensitivity to real features of the world. When one gazes
on another with love, as M did with D, the good qualities that one’s
beloved genuinely possesses (and not qualities that one projects on them
because of one’s loving gaze, as an anti-realist might contend) are revealed.
As might be unsurprising, Murdoch’s view of love has appeared quix-
otic to some critics. Does it really map on to love as we normally under-
stand it? Against the criticism that Murdoch’s epistemic conception of
love rules out the affective component that is stressed in all love songs, for
example, Mason points out, first, that there are respectable theories of
emotion that present all emotions as having an epistemic component; sec-
ond, that our common-sense conception of love includes the thesis that
true love requires truly knowing one’s beloved; and third, that love cannot
be reduced to an affective state alone, because such states are necessarily
intermittent, whereas a love can last a lifetime. Against the criticism that
Murdoch’s view cannot account for the selectivity of love—a criticism lev-
eled at Velleman’s view, as we saw, and potentially worse for Murdoch,
who rejects the idea that love is optional—Mason distinguishes between
love and loving attention. Whereas the latter might be what is com-
manded, it is necessary but not sufficient for the variety of loves that there
are, and what might make particular loves (for one’s children, for a
8 S. CUSHING

romantic partner) selective or unique might be a function of how one’s

relationship or the behavior of one’s beloved facilitates the loving atten-
tion. Finally, there is the criticism that Murdoch’s view seems to presume
that everyone is a suitable subject for loving attention. But we are familiar
with loves that we think are profoundly mistaken, or individuals who make
unsuitable subjects for loving attention, perhaps because they are irre-
deemably wicked. But, first, a truly loving attention, because it is attuned
to reality, would reveal an absence of good just as much as its presence.
And second, the idea that loving attention is commanded for all is not
peculiar to Murdoch: its most famous proponent is the Jesus of the
Gospels.

1.4   Love Me Do
The philosopher Sally Haslanger, in her writing on gender, coined the
term “ameliorative inquiry” for an approach to defining a concept that
aims not solely at descriptive accuracy about the way people currently use
it, but at producing a possibly revisionist, improved version, with the aim
of making the society that employs the concept a better place. In Chap. 4,
“‘Love’ as a Practice: Looking at Real People,” Lotte Spreeuwenberg sug-
gests that we should do the same for the concept of love. As we have seen,
both Velleman and Iris Murdoch have offered influential moralized
accounts of love, and Spreeuwenberg’s first task is to evaluate whether
either suits the ameliorative inquiry she has in mind. Tackling Velleman’s
first: while she applauds his commitment to “really seeing” one’s beloved,
she, in common with many of Velleman’s critics, finds unsatisfactory both
his view of the subject of the loving gaze as the Kantian self, and his solu-
tion to the selectivity of love (in contrast to the universality of the require-
ment of respect) in the claim that it is a contingent fact that we respond
with love to certain empirical selves and not to others. The problem with
this, points out Spreeuwenberg, is that it fails to account for the personal
character of love, both because the bare Kantian self is impersonal, but
also because it is a mystery what features of an individual may trigger us to
respond to their Kantian self rather than another’s.
Spreeuwenberg thus turns to the view of an author who attempts to fix
this flaw while preserving what is valuable in a Velleman-like approach:
Pilar Lopez-Cantero. She suggests that the subject of the loving gaze is
not the bare Kantian self but its product, which is a narrative. This is
indeed unique to each person, thereby better accounting for the personal
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

character of love, with “narrative fit” between lover and beloved explain-
ing when and why love blossoms. However, Spreeuwenberg finds the
views of both Lopez-Cantero and Velleman to be too passive, certainly for
her ameliorative inquiry, and uses the example of Dante and his “muse”
Beatrice (whom he barely exchanged two words with, but fixated on) to
illustrate why. While Dante certainly believes he loves Beatrice, and is
caused to do so by some feature he perceives in her, he is not perceiving
her as she truly is, but as some ideal that he projects on to her. Love should
be, in the words of bell hooks, a verb, that is, active, a process, as Adrienne
Rich puts it, “of refining the truths [lovers] tell each other.” Viewing it
this way shifts the focus from the lover alone to an interactive partnership,
and Iris Murdoch’s writings on love provide a framework for this active
approach. Murdoch’s “M and D” case, described earlier, is an illustration
of love as truly attending to the target of one’s gaze to see her in her
(changing) reality. Spreeuwenberg considers suggestions by psychologists
like Lisa Bortolotti that projecting fantasies on to one’s partner might
have positive effects for the lover or the relationship, but concludes that
fantasies are no part of the ameliorative project, especially if we widen its
scope to the political sphere and call on love to break down barriers
between oppressors and oppressed. Spreeuwenberg ends by cautioning
that we should not assume that we can capture the full reality of our
beloved, or even that this is the goal, agreeing with Carla Bagnoli that
understanding another has a possibly invasive aspect. But love as attending
to others is the love that will make us and our society a better place, and
therefore the best reconstruction of the concept for a project of making
love a force for good.

1.5   Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow

It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that love is something over
which we have no control: we fall in love, sometimes against our better
judgment and to our own dismay. On this view, love is, in the words of the
title of a paper by Nick Zangwill, “gloriously amoral and arational”
(Zangwill 2013). However, I say “almost,” because in Chap. 5, “Love,
Choice, and Taking Responsibility,” Christopher Cowley argues for an
important role for choice in love, in the form of a lover taking responsibil-
ity for meeting the prospective needs of their beloved. Thus, Cowley joins
the previous authors in finding a moral core in love. Cowley takes up
Susan Wolf’s suggestion that there is a virtue in a willingness to take
10 S. CUSHING

responsibility for what one has yet to do (prospective responsibility, rather

than the more usually discussed retroactive kind) and locates just such a
virtue in the commitments of an ongoing loving relationship between
adults. Using the marriage vow as a case study, Cowley argues that it
involves not just responsibility for one’s spouse and the needs of the per-
son they will become, but also responsibility for becoming the kind of
person who will stay committed, both to the love and to the meeting of
needs. Cowley responds to challenges to this analysis of love both from
existentialists, who could argue that it involves an abandonment of radical
freedom and a bad faith essentialization of both parties, and also from a
famous case described by Michael Stocker, where a person confined to a
hospital is dismayed to find that the person he had considered a friend was
motivated solely by moral duty to visit him (Stocker 1976). Cowley sug-
gests that we can distinguish between duty and responsibility, where the
problem with the former is that it is impersonal, while the latter comprises
a response to the particular friend and their needs. In this respect, Cowley’s
view resembles Harry Frankfurt’s depiction of love as a configuration of
the will that presents the lover with felt necessities that they experience
just like the demands of conscience. However, Cowley finds Frankfurt’s
view too unilateral, as it focuses entirely on the experiences of the lover,
allowing for such phenomena as unrequited love or even love of non-­
persons. Cowley contends that the love he wants to defend is necessarily
instantiated in the relationship between two lovers, both of them moral
agents. That love, claims Cowley, is depicted beautifully in The Little
Prince, where those who have chosen each other become unique in the
whole world to each other. In some respects, Cowley’s view solves the
problem of specificity (that we saw plagued Velleman’s view, in the eyes of
his critics) in a similar way to Niko Kolodny’s view (Kolodny 2003), but
adds to it the normative principle that love requires of us that we maintain
and live up to the demands of that relationship.

1.6   Love Is a Battlefield

Just how seriously should we take the comparison between love and war
at work in both Ecclesiastes and the well-known proverb? Andrew Sneddon,
in Chap. 6, “Not All’s Fair in Love and War: Toward Just Love Theory,”
suggests that, just as “Just War” theory subverts that proverb in the case
of war, we should construct a “Just Love” theory to provide an ethical
roadmap for loving relationships. Just War theory is typically divided into
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

three parts: jus ad bellum, which concerns the grounds for going to war;
jus in bello, which lays out the restrictions on what is acceptable while war
is waged; and jus post bellum, covering the aftermath. Sneddon focuses on
analogs of the first two for the conducting of loving relationships. But
before embarking on either, he first contends with the challenge faced by
any attempt to lay out the ethics of war: that the very idea is naïve. Self-­
styled “realists” reject the notion that war is an appropriate (or even pos-
sible) subject of a code of ethics. A parallel challenge to Just Love theory
takes Zangwill’s stance on the amorality of love. However, even were that
the case, Sneddon contends that loving relationships, and the actions taken
in their context, are very much intentional, and thus subject to moral
evaluation. Furthermore, Sneddon argues that if we assume the following
things about love (he focusses strictly on the romantic kind): that it is
other-directed, tied up with other emotions, and love affects other emo-
tions holistically, so that emotions felt as part of a loving relationship are
experienced as part of that relationship, this reveals the need for an ethical
rulebook, given how profoundly one’s actions affect the other party in a
loving relationship.
The love analog of jus ad bellum Sneddon calls jus ad amantes necessi-
tudo. Where war requires a just cause, love requires a just target, someone
who is capable of participating in a loving relationship and capable of con-
senting to the costs of that relationship. The costs may depend on the
goals of the relationship, which must also be just. These goals can be
internal to the relationship, such as being partners, or external (in the
sense that they could possibly be secured without such a relationship), like
having sex, children, or company. Other criteria of jus ad amantes necessi-
tudo include “necessity” (a loving relationship is necessary to achieving
the goals, at least, when they are internal), “proportionality” (of the rela-
tionship to the strengths of one’s sentiments and importance of the
goals—interestingly Sneddon allows that if one is infatuated with a celeb-
rity, seeking a relationship with them is not ruled out by this criterion,
although very likely by others), and “chance of success” (the analog of
chance of victory in war). One tentative conclusion Sneddon draws is that
it will be very difficult for external goals to justify a relationship according
to these criteria—so much for arranged marriages.
What about rules for behavior within loving relationships? Jus in aman-
tes necessitudo governs actions motivated by love in a relationship already
established, and, argues Sneddon, must be weighed against other priori-
ties in a life well-lived. Displays of affection that bother others (one thinks
12 S. CUSHING

of the Seinfeld episode (“The Soup Nazi”) where Jerry and his girlfriend-­
of-­the-episode (played by Alexandra Wentworth) refer to each other as
“schmoopy”) are out, and Sneddon recalls bitterly having to cover for a
co-worker at a fast food job because she was trying to reconcile with her
boyfriend. How useful is this sketch? Can real lovers actually follow such
guidelines, or is the realist right to scoff? You be the judge, dear reader.

1.7   Is This Love?

It is impossible to doubt whether or not one is in pain. But it does not
seem to be impossible to doubt whether or not one is in love. In Chap. 7,
“Doubting Love,” inspired by Graham Greene’s novel The End of the
Affair, Larry A. Herzberg analyzes the nature of love that would make
this doubt possible, and what are the limits of doubt and certainty in mat-
ters of the heart. Herzberg draws inspiration from R.J. Sternberg’s influ-
ential “triangular theory” of love that divides love into distinct components
of emotion, passion, and commitment. He argues that doubt is possible to
varying degrees about each of these components. Least doubt is possible
about our passionate feelings (they are most similar to feelings like pain,
whose presence or absence is indubitable), most doubt is possible about
our emotions, and somewhere in between lies our certainty about the
nature or existence of our commitments. Herzberg agrees with Christopher
Cowley on the importance of commitment to love and points out that
there has to be a volitional element to love to explain both the defensive-
ness and guilt about the wrong answer to the question “do you love me?”
as well as feelings of betrayal against a lover whose love goes away.
Herzberg also argues that one may doubt one’s emotions, both because
one may be unsure of their objects, and because love can be comprised of
a cluster of other emotions, each of which may be hard to distinguish from
other, closely related emotions which are not indicative of love. However,
Herzberg concludes that doubt is not an essential corollary of love and
that there are many people whose circumstances and history ensure that
they can be sure of their love.

1.8   Can’t Help Falling in Love

The view that love is something that happens to us irrespective of our
plans and choices has fared poorly so far, despite its intuitive appeal, and in
Chap. 8, “Love and Free Agency,” Ishtiyaque Haji aims to deliver another
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

wounding blow against it. Haji argues that love is “fragile,” in the sense
that the value or even existence of love is conditional on the results of age-­
old philosophical debates about free will. To put this in context, since at
least the time of the ancient Greeks, arguments have been considered that
purport to threaten our usual conviction that we are free agents, able to
control our own destinies, and, as a corollary, appropriately subject to
assessments of responsibility such as praise and blame. That is, the reason
why we standardly think it is legitimate to hold people accountable for
their wrongdoings (or praiseworthy for their virtuous acts) is because we
think those actions were up to them, under their control, not merely things
that happened to them. However, “responsibility skeptics” produce argu-
ments to show that, really, our actions are not up to us, and our belief that
they are is based on an illusion.
Extreme responsibility skeptics argue that none of our actions are ever
up to us, which seems very radical to the uninitiated, but one can work
gradually toward that conclusion by less extreme steps. One such step is to
argue for “responsibility historicism,” which is the view that whether or
not somebody is capable of the kinds of action that merit assessments of
responsibility depends on factors outside of the mind and body of that
individual (which is why the view is also called “externalism”). One major
argument for externalism involves thought experiments depicting fiendish
psychological manipulation of individuals, such as Alfred Mele’s example
“One Bad Day” (Mele 2019: 20–21) quoted by Haji. In this case, the
saintly Sally is manipulated to have just the same evil psychological makeup
as the merciless murderer Chuck, so that Sally intentionally plots and exe-
cutes a hapless victim over the course of the titular day, only to have her
saintly psychology reinstated by the same twisted psychological manipula-
tors during the night that follows. Mele contends that we should all agree
that Sally should not be held responsible for her murder, but Chuck should
for his, even though both are the same from an internalist perspective.
Thus, whether or not one should be held responsible for an action depends
on the history of how the psychology that produced that action was
acquired (hence “historicism”). Canvassing various recent philosophical
accounts of love (some of which should be very familiar to us by now),
Haji contends that all of them contain necessary psychological elements
that are open to the same kind of arguments for externalism as the
responsibility-­undergirding ones in “One Bad Day.” To make the point,
Haji describes “One Lovely Day,” where whatever psychological states
manifest Romeo’s love for Juliet are implanted in Romello for a day.
14 S. CUSHING

During that day, asks Haji, “does Romello indeed love Juliet?” Haji con-
tends that if we are moved by the externalist arguments supported by
“One Bad Day,” then we should conclude that Romello does not, and
that love, like responsibility, depends not just on the presence of certain
psychological states, but on how they have been acquired. (Lest one won-
der about the relevance of paranoid science-fiction cases involving devious
covert mind-manipulators, once historicism is established, the next step is
to argue that natural forces like genetics and environment, the kinds of
things that really do shape our psychological makeups, can have similar
responsibility/love undermining effects.)
However, even if one is not convinced by this to become an externalist,
Haji maintains that even from an internalist/anti-historicist standpoint,
“One Lovely Day” reveals three results. First, even if Romello really does
love Juliet during his manipulated day, that love is of a lesser value—is
forced or ersatz. Second, to be an instance of loving behavior, an action or
state has to issue from love. This parallels the distinction, insisted on by
Kant, among others, between praiseworthy virtuous action from duty, and
non-praiseworthy, only apparently virtuous action in accordance with duty.
That is, just as one’s helping somebody is not meritorious if one does it
solely for an expected reward, so one’s showing affection to another is
only praiseworthy from love’s standpoint if it is motivated by love, and not
by duty or other considerations. Haji develops this thought in a section
where he expands the suggested analogs between behavior that is morally
responsible and that is motivated by love, arguing that any view of love
that posits that “emotions may be construed as constituting relationships
of love and friendship” supports this parallel. Haji goes on to propose the
notion of normative standards (he suggests the terms “commendability”
and “censurability”) from love’s standpoint. The third result Haji adduces
from “One Lovely Day” is that love is fragile in the sense introduced at the
start, that it has “freedom or autonomy presuppositions.” Finally, Haji
considers an attempt by noted free-will skeptic Derk Pereboom to save
love from just the kind of externalist considerations that he (and Haji) use
against responsibility. Pereboom is, in effect, a “love optimist,” because he
believes that while there may be emotions, like remorse and guilt, that are
both associated with relationships and “fragile” to externalist consider-
ations, they may easily be substituted by non-fragile alternatives, like sor-
row and regret. Against this attempt, Haji contends that these suggested
analogs are equally fragile. If Seth harms you, suggests Haji, and then
expresses sorrow, you would not accept that sorrow as genuine if you
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

found that it was (once again) produced in him solely by psychological

manipulation. Thus Haji concludes that whether or not we are free agents
impacts not just whether or not we are morally responsible, but also
whether or not we are capable of love, something philosophers of religion
have long insisted on in offering justifications for God granting us free
will, despite the fact that (they claim) it is responsible for all the evil and
suffering in the world.

1.9   Love Me for a Reason

A theme running through the chapters we have just discussed has been the
dispute over the extent to which love can be seen as a “gloriously ara-
tional” force that overtakes us and carries us along in a way that is beyond
our control (and is thus something we cannot be held accountable for) or
whether or not our love and what issues from it is a matter of rational
appraisal. The front on which this dispute is most overtly fought in con-
temporary analytic philosophy is in the dispute over the relationship (or
not) between love and reasons.
The most influential philosopher advocating a “No Reason” view of
love (which, to be clear, means that no reasons can be given for why we
love, although, as we shall see, he argues that love itself is the ground of
reasons for a great many things) is Harry Frankfurt. His writing provided
the motivation for many critics who have themselves become influential,
most notably Velleman and Niko Kolodny. Such critics point out that love
does not seem like bodily functions such as sweating and digestion, things
that are genuinely not the products of our decisions. And it does seem
like, if asked “why do you love x?” the kind of answer expected is not sim-
ply “because certain chemicals were released in my brain” but rather one
involving reasons like “x is so dreamy!” or “x is my child!” or even, if one
believes Velleman, “x is a Kantian moral agent.” The love one feels, in
short, can be justified. Or so goes the Reason View of love. There are sev-
eral variants, of course, but the most intuitive has it that when x loves y it
is because of a feature or set of features of y. On the one hand, this seems
right: x’s love of y should be explained by something about y. If the reason
for x loving y had nothing to do with y, then y would no doubt be insulted
(“I love you because of a compulsion I have to love everybody”). And, of
course, we saw that a challenge faced by Velleman’s view was that he
picked a feature that was too general (at least for his critics—as Kolodny
put it, “personal ads do not read: ‘Bare Kantian person seeks same’”
16 S. CUSHING

(Kolodny 2003: 174)), but on the other hand, if one does pick particular
features of the beloved, then that also seems objectionable. Philosophers
writing on this topic are fond of citing W.B. Yeats’ “For Ann Gregory,”
wherein a girl with gorgeous “honey-colored” hair yearns that young men
“May love me for myself alone/And not my yellow hair.” This is the core
of the No Reason view’s attack on the Reason view, but No Reasoners
have more weapons in their arsenal. In Chap. 9, “Sentimental Reasons,”
Edgar Phillips, citing Setiya (2014), lists four puzzles that point to appar-
ently counterintuitive implications of a Reason view. First, universality: if
Ennis’ love for Jack is based on good reasons, shouldn’t every rational
agent, exposed to the same reasons, also love Jack? Second, promiscuity: if
Catherine loves Jules for a certain reason (say, the insouciant way he
smokes his Gauloises), then if Jim embodies the same feature, shouldn’t
Catherine also love him? Third, trading up: suppose Kamariah loves
Thomas for his long curly hair. If someone with an even more impressive
mane shows up, it implies that she should abandon Thomas for the prefer-
ably coiffed alternative. Finally, inconstancy: philosophers who discuss this
problem are wont to cite Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 wherein he writes
“Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds.” When Billy Bragg
says, “And then one day it happened/She cut her hair and I stopped lov-
ing her” (“Walk Away Renee (Version)”), it is not meant to reflect well on
the maturity of the authorial voice, but it seems to follow from the Reason
View that should you lose the features that were the basis for my love for
you, then my love will cease.
Our two authors on this topic, Phillips and N.L. Engel-Hawbecker,
respond to puzzles such as these by digging deeper into the nature of rea-
sons themselves. Phillips points out that there are actually three different
kinds of roles that reasons can play. Reasons can explain behavior by point-
ing to a cause, whether or not that cause was known to the actor. Reasons
can also be what a person has in mind when acting intentionally (“moti-
vating” or “personal” reasons). Finally, reasons can justify one’s behavior.
It may be, posits Phillips, that a particular Reasons View of love envisages
the kind of reason in question to play one of the roles, but not the other.
For example, the fact that I was hungry is a perfectly good explanation of
why I bought a loaf of bread. Raising the objection “but that doesn’t
explain why you bought that loaf of bread!” seems beside the point.
However, he concludes that for many of the proponents of Reason Views,
the reasons are meant to play more than one of these roles. So next he
suggests that perhaps the problem is that we are mischaracterizing love by
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

comparing it with reason-responsive dispositions like intention or belief.

While it is true that a belief I have (say, that injecting bleach will cure
Covid-19) requires justification, and should alter if the circumstances it
concerns change or new information comes to light, this does not neces-
sarily apply to love. Perhaps, suggests Phillips, love is a sentiment, where
such things, like one’s character, are deep, long-lasting, developed gradu-
ally over time, and not formed by choice. This is not to say, however, that
Phillips is defending a pure No Reasons view: reasons are too important to
interpersonal affairs to be abandoned entirely, and once again, love is not
like digestion. However, the kinds of reason one gives may not be profit-
ably judged by the kinds of reason one should give to justify one’s beliefs
or intentions.
In Chap. 10, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice? Enticing Reasons to Love,” Engel-­
Hawbecker takes a different tack. He frames the No Reasons view’s chal-
lenge as the assertion that the following two claims cannot be held
simultaneously: Requiring Reasons (reasons can require people to do what
they favor) and Love’s Prerogative (there is nothing that can require us to
love anyone). It is because of the former that we are presented with puz-
zles like promiscuity and trading up: if my love for x is explained by reason
r, and reason r applies also, or more so, to y, then I am required to love y
as well or instead. And it is because of the latter that we reject this conclu-
sion. The problem is not with Love’s Prerogative, but perhaps we can
reject Requiring Reasons without rejecting the idea that love is for a rea-
son. One attempt at this approach suggests that the reasons for love are
“warranting” reasons: reasons that, while they permit an option for which
they provide a reason, as do normal reasons, do not forbid its absence. If
this were the case then, for example, we avoid promiscuity because, while
one is permitted to love every bearer of the feature that is the reason for
love in one case, one is not required consistently to love each one.
However, Engel-Hawbecker finds two problems with this thesis. The
first is that, lacking an argument that all reasons for love are like this, it
appears ad hoc. But second, if it is the case that love needs reasons before
it is permitted, then something must be forbidding it otherwise. But one
can hope to be loved even if one admits that one lacks lovable features
without this hope being perverse, implying that there is nothing that for-
bids love even without features that might serve as reasons for it. So if
there are reasons for love that are not requiring, they are not warranting
reasons, says Engel-Hawbecker. Instead, we should notice that reasons
typically have two kinds of properties. When they require or forbid
18 S. CUSHING

something (as my belief that a number is odd requires my belief that it

cannot be divided into two equal integers), they are showing their deontic
properties. But they also have evaluative properties, as when they make
“an option attractive rather than demanded, required, or right,” in the
words of Jonathan Dancy (2004: 91), who first asserted the possible exis-
tence of reasons which have only evaluative properties, which he dubbed
“enticing reasons.” Engel-Hawbecker suggests that the reasons for love
could be just such kinds of reasons, and if so, that means we can abandon
Requiring Reasons and keep Love’s Prerogative, without being forced to
adopt a No Reasons view. Puzzles like promiscuity can be avoided: while
my love for x is justified by a particular set of properties they instantiated,
I am not thereby required also to love y because they also instantiate those
properties. And indeed, while reasons for love are, in his view, enticing,
Engel-­Hawbecker insists that that does not mean that reasons of love,
which may include duties to our current lover (x), cannot be requiring,
and may preempt being drawn away by a similarly featured other.

1.10   Drowning in the Sea of Love

In chapter 11, “Love, Motivation, and Reasons: The Case of the Drowning
Wife,” Monica Roland takes up the discussion of such reasons of love, the
kind of reasons that Harry Frankfurt does endorse. I have already had cause
to mention Bernard Williams’ discussion of Charles Fried’s “case of the
drowning wife” (and his contention that Fried gives the husband “one
thought too many” in deliberating about preferring his wife over another
who is also drowning), and this case is much-discussed in the contempo-
rary literature on love. Roland uses this case as a touchstone to discuss the
nature of the reasons love offers for benevolent acts toward others and
their relationship with moral reasons. She argues that Frankfurt, Velleman,
and Kolodny each get something right about the case and something
wrong. What Frankfurt gets right is that it is not the bare spousal relation-
ship that provides reasons for partial treatment, and further that the hus-
band does not need to reflect in the heat of the moment to be motivated
to help his beloved. What Frankfurt gets wrong, in Roland’s view, is that
loving relationships can be normatively significant, and, furthermore, valu-
ation of those relationships by the lovers can (partially) constitute the love
they have for each other. What Velleman gets right (and Frankfurt denies—
although Roland argues that he is undermined in this denial by his insis-
tence that love is a disinterested concern) is that love is a moral emotion,
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

necessarily involving the moral attitude of respect, and furthermore that

the reason for the husband’s partiality is their relationship. But Velleman
is wrong to say that the relationship plays no part in their love.
Both Frankfurt’s and Velleman’s accounts fail to provide an adequate
account of love’s selectivity—why one has reason to love only one’s lover
and not a qualitatively identical doppelganger. Kolodny’s solution to this
problem is that one is only in a relationship with the original, not their
clone: it is not the intrinsic properties of one’s beloved that explain the
selectivity of love, but the relational ones. Roland also agrees with
Kolodny’s insistence that love is deemed by the lover to be rendered
appropriate by the relationship (loving behavior by a stranger is inappro-
priate and disconcerting). But she believes that he is wrong to omit lovers’
mutual appreciation of both intrinsic and relational properties as partly
constitutive of the relationship. Roland ends up endorsing a “dual
account” of love. Velleman’s moralized valuation of personhood provides
one element, but is too general to suffice alone and must be comple-
mented by a valuation of particulars, including the relational properties
one’s beloved bears toward oneself. This results in the husband having not
one but two reasons to rescue his wife. But, to avoid a Williamsesque
charge that this gives the husband two thoughts too many, Roland sug-
gests that neither need be consciously formulated at the time of action:
“awareness of the inherent value of his wife and the special relationship he
has with her are built in to the very fabric of the husband’s dispositions
and thus implicit to his motivating thought.”

1.11   The Love Cats

Up to this point we have only considered love as something that happens
between (two) human individuals. However, many of us genuinely feel
that we love our pets, while at the same time acknowledging that they lack
many of the capacities that feature in several of the theories we have can-
vassed so far. (I have no doubt my cats do not respect me in the way
Velleman means, and possibly in any way.) In Chap. 12, “Can Our Beloved
Pets Love Us Back?” Ryan Stringer investigates whether there is any pos-
sibility that the behavior we take as affection in the non-human animals
(NHAs) in our lives could be indicative of something deserving to be
called love. It turns out that there are a number of books and articles writ-
ten by scientists that defend the claim that, indeed, some NHAs are capa-
ble of love, and do love the humans in their lives. While Stringer professes
20 S. CUSHING

himself keen to have this be true, particularly of the cats with whom he is
in an otherwise mildly abusive (on their part) relationship, as a philoso-
pher he feels he cannot take the scientists’ purported evidence as sufficient
without challenge. Against Gregory Burns’ (2013) claim that dogs’ empa-
thy for us is sufficient to demonstrate their love for us, Stringer points out
that one can feel empathy for someone whom one hates, and it might even
help in the task of making them suffer. Against Carl Safina’s claim (Dreifus
2019) that dogs’ desire to be near us for no other reason than to be near
us evinces their love, Stringer points out both that stalkers can have this,
and that it is in theory possible to have that desire isolated from any love
for the target of that desire. Finally, Stringer assesses several different pur-
ported pieces of evidence for canine love in Clive Wynne’s (2019) Dog Is
Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You. That dogs have the capacity to
form affectionate relationships with us does not suffice, because such
things come in a wide spectrum, only some of which are loving relation-
ships. That dogs exhibit hyper-social behavior fails because there are con-
ditions that some humans have, including Williams-Beuren Syndrome,
which are similar but not taken as proof of love. Wynne fares better in
Stringer’s estimation by stressing that dogs show distress at being sepa-
rated from their humans, find it rewarding to be near them, and appar-
ently care about them to the point of trying to help them when in distress.
Of these, evidence of attachment is deemed too self-interested to count,
but Stringer takes the caring as the best potential ground for an attribu-
tion of a capacity to love.
So what does love consist in, if not these scientists’ criteria? Stringer
postulates that, whatever else comprises love, it must have at least the fol-
lowing three essential components: a disposition to feel affection (which is
more than the simple presence of affection, because love is more persistent
than such a potentially fleeting and necessarily intermittent feeling), a
non-instrumental concern for the welfare of one’s beloved, to the extent
of prioritizing the promotion of their welfare, and the assessment of one’s
beloved as so special as to be irreplaceable. Failure to capture all three of
these key components dooms the initially promising philosophical
accounts of Thomas Hurka (an attitudinal-dispositional theory) and of
Andrew Franklin-Hall and Agnieszka Jaworska (solely dispositional), but
these are potentially captured by Sam Shpall’s (2018) tripartite theory of
love. Shpall analyzes meaningful love as a devotion to an object that is
liked, which partly consists in special concern for that object’s good, which
partly consists in emotional vulnerability to that good and what affects it.
 1 INTRODUCTION 21

Stringer suggests that if the notion of devotion is expanded to include the

idea that the object of one’s devotion is irreplaceable, then this view cap-
tures his requirements. However, does it allow that NHAs can love the
humans that love them? Stringer concludes that if we allow that some-
thing that does not quite rise to Shpall’s standard of meaningful love is
still love, then dogs are plausible candidates for a capacity to love. He is
forced to conclude, however, that cats fail to meet the standards of emo-
tional vulnerability to our welfare and benevolent desire for our happiness.
In a coda, however, he suggests that the relationship we can have with cats
is still valuable and love-like, and this is no small thing.

1.12   Computer Love

So much for animals loving us—what about things that are apparently
inanimate? The 2013 Spike Jonze film her depicts a love story between a
human and an artificially intelligent operating system. Assuming such a
thing were possible, would it be desirable? Would the “love” that resulted
be of any value? In Chap. 13, “Romantic Love Between Humans and AIs:
A Feminist Ethical Critique,” Andrea Klonschinski and Michael Kühler
argue that there are important reasons to doubt that it would. The first
problem with the kind of relationship depicted in the film is that the “rela-
tionship” reinforces pernicious gender stereotypes. “Samantha” is created
to meet every need that Theodore might have. However, lest it be said
that this can be avoided by making AIs male, besides the fact that the male
ones can also reinforce stereotypes (particularly if they’re built into things
like your GPS and thus telling you what to do), the second problem rears
its head: because AIs lack autonomy, the relationship is of necessity asym-
metrical. This is true no matter what philosophical model of love you
favor; the authors consider models whereby love is construed as an atti-
tude instantiated in the lover, as in Harry Frankfurt’s love-as-caring model,
love is construed intersubjectively, as in Angelika Krebs’ model of love as
interpersonal sharing, or love is construed as a union, where the partici-
pants form a “we-identity,” as postulated by Mark Fisher, and Roberts
Nozick, and Solomon. In no case can the relationship between humans
and AIs meet the requirement of a love between equals, and thus, if it
counts as love at all, it is only a degenerate form, not worth pursuing.
Moreover, these problems cannot be solved simply by better program-
ming: giving the AIs a personality would not solve the power imbalance.
The user would still be able to adjust that personality in the “settings,” the
22 S. CUSHING

better to suit their preferences. And giving the AI actual moral autonomy
is either impossible (depending on your metaphysics) or potentially cata-
strophic. As Klonschinski and Kühler wryly note, it would not be finan-
cially advantageous to make a product that could reject its user, not to
mention the Terminator/Robopocalypse/Ex Machina apocalyptic possibili-
ties. Finally, lest the problem of unequal relationships with AIs be dis-
missed as ethically trivial, given that they are not persons, Klonschinski and
Kühler remind us of the deleterious effects on our relationships with per-
sons, and on our moral characters, particularly if the gender imbalances
produce more sexists. They cite Kant’s distinction: we may not fail in our
duties to AIs, but we may very well fail with regard to them. Thus,
Klonschinski and Kühler’s piece draws a nice contrast with Stringer’s:
where he argues that our relationships with our pets can be enriching, our
relationships with artificial non-persons are potential minefields.

1.13   Thin Line Between Love and Hate

If there is any entity for which love is professed as much as love for another
human, it is one’s country. However, it is a love that is not always looked
on as a good thing. Erich Fromm’s sentiment is not uncommon:

Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. ‘Patriotism’

is its cult…Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others
is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for human-
ity is not love, but idolatrous worship. (Fromm 1955: 58)

However, in Chap. 14, “Patriotism and Nationalism as Two Distinct Ways

of Loving One’s Country,” authors Maria Ioannou, Martijn Boot, Ryan
Wittingslow, and Adriana Mattos (who themselves represent four different
nationalities) argue that not only can a principled distinction be made
between nationalism and patriotism, but that, while they are both instances
of love for one’s country, they are distinct kinds of love: only the former is
usually pernicious, and the latter does not necessarily prove a gateway to
it. Patriotism, which they define as love for one’s country along with a
sense of personal identification with it and concern for its well-­being, is
likened to the love a child has for their parent. Nationalism, they allow, is
a more-contested term, but settle on the definition of nationalism used to
refer to European nationalism from the late nineteenth to mid-­twentieth
centuries. The difference between the two is that, while both feature
 1 INTRODUCTION 23

in-group love, only nationalism features out-group derogation, an obser-

vation that they back up citing both sociological literature and the results
of psychological experimentation. The love involved in nationalism has
this feature, they argue, because it is more akin to passionate love, which
carries with it both the refusal to acknowledge the flaws in the beloved
(which leads to jingoistic distorted evaluation of one’s own country above
others) and the possibility of loss and attendant desperation. Nationalists
are in love with a particular version of their country, one associated with
their particular ethnic or cultural group, and one that is easily threatened,
in a way that provokes the worst excesses that we see in nationalism. The
authors’ diverse disciplinary background makes this article stand out in
how it draws on a particularly wide ranging variety of literatures, psycho-
logical and sociological, along with literature and philosophy, to make a
compelling case for their distinctions. This is only fitting given how love
itself is the subject of so many disciplines, so it is refreshing to see a case be
made that empirical studies (like a study involving inhaling oxytocin prior
to running trolley-problem cases with in-group versus out-­group potential
victims) can elucidate our theoretical conclusions. If they are correct, their
analysis helps to explain what kind of national crises are most likely to
provoke nationalist violence, but also to rescue patriotism from the disre-
pute to which writers like Fromm have consigned it.

1.14   References
Badhwar, Neera Kapur. 1989. Friends as Ends in Themselves. In Eros, Agape and
Philia: Readings in the Philosophy of Love, ed. Alan Soble, 165–188. St. Paul,
MN: Paragon House.
Burns, Gregory. 2013. How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog
Decode the Canine Brain. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Dancy, Jonathan. 2004. Enticing Reasons. In Reason and Value: Themes from
Joseph Raz, ed. R. Jay Wallace, Philip Pettit, Samuel Scheffler, and Michael
Smith, 91–118. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dreifus, Claudia. 2019. Carl Safina Is Certain Your Dog Loves You. The New
York Times.
Fisher, Mark. 1990. Personal Love. London: Duckworth.
Franklin-Hall, Andrew, and Agnieszka Jaworska. 2017. Holding on to Reasons of
the Heart: Cognitive Degeneration and the Capacity to Love. In Love, Reason
and Morality, ed. Esther Kroeker and Katrien Schaubroeck, 20–38. New York:
Routledge.
Fromm, Erich. 1955. The Sane Society. New York: Rinehart and Winston.
24 S. CUSHING

Haslanger, Sally. 2012. Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hopwood, Mark, 2014. Love’s Work: Eros and Moral Agency. ProQuest
Dissertations and Theses.
———. 2017. “The Extremely Difficult Realisation That Something Other Than
Oneself Is Real”: Iris Murdoch on Love and Moral Agency. European Journal
of Philosophy 26: 477–501.
Hurka, Thomas. 2017. Love and Reasons: The Many Relationships. In Love,
Reason and Morality, ed. Esther Kroeker and Katrien Schaubroeck, 163–180.
New York: Routledge.
Kolodny, N. 2003. Love as Valuing a Relationship. Philosophical Review 112
(2): 135–189.
Krebs, Angelika. 2014. Between I and Thou – On the Dialogical Nature of Love.
In Love and Its Objects. What Can We Care For? ed. Christian Maurer, Tony
Milligan, and Kamila Pacovská, 7–24. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mele, Alfred. 2019. Manipulated Agents: A Window to Moral Responsibility.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Nozick, Robert. 1990. Love’s Bond. In The Examined Life. Philosophical
Meditations, 68–86. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Rich, Adrienne. 1995. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978. WW
Norton & Company.
Setiya, K. (2014). Love and the Value of a Life. Philosophical Review, 123(3),
p. 251–280.
Shpall, Sam. 2018. A Tripartite Theory of Love. Journal of Ethics and Social
Philosophy 13: 91–124.
Solomon, Robert C. 1994. About Love. Reinventing Romance for Our Times.
Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., Reprint 2006.
Stocker, M. 1976. The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories. The Journal of
Philosophy 73 (14): 453–446.
Velleman, J. David. 1999. Love as a Moral Emotion. Ethics 109 (2): 338–374.
———. 2008. Beyond Price. Ethics 118: 191–212.
Williams, Bernard. 1981. Persons, Character and Morality. In Moral Luck, 1–19.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wolf, S. 2004. The Moral of Moral Luck. In Setting the Moral Compass. Essays by
Woman Philosophers, ed. C. Calhoun, 113–127. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Wynne, Clive. 2019. Dog Is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You. New York:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Zangwill, Nick. 2013. Love: Gloriously Amoral and Arational. Philosophical
Explorations 16 (3): 298–314.
 CHAPTER 2

Making Room for Love in Kantian Ethics

Ernesto V. Garcia

2.1   Introduction
Kant’s ethics is traditionally seen as defending an austere view of morality.
With his focus on moral duty and exceptionless universal laws, Kant seems
to leave out many important aspects of our moral lives, including personal
feelings like sympathy and compassion and more partial relationships like
friendship and love. As Bernard Williams writes in his classic work Ethics
and the Limits of Philosophy about this general outlook:

The important thing about morality is its spirit, its underlying aims, and the
general picture of ethical life it implies. In order to see them, we shall need
to look carefully at a particular concept, moral obligation […] Morality is
distinguished by the special notion of obligation it uses, and by the signifi-
cance it gives to it […] The philosopher who has given the purest, deepest,
and most thorough representation of morality is Kant. But morality is not
an invention of philosophers. It is the outlook, or, incoherently, part of the
outlook, of almost all of us. (Williams 2006: 174)

E. V. Garcia (*)
University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA
e-mail: evg@philos.umass.edu

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 25

Switzerland AG 2021
S. Cushing (ed.), New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72324-8_2
26 E. V. GARCIA

For Williams, Kant’s excessive preoccupation with moral duty above all
else reduces the moral agent to ‘a rational agent and no more’—that is, a
kind of ‘noumenal self, outside time and causality’ that we privilege at the
expense of ‘the concrete, empirically determined person that one usually
takes oneself to be’ (Williams 2006: 63).
Thus, it might be surprising for many readers to discover that Kant—as
well as many contemporary Kantian ethical approaches—in fact have a lot
to say about love in general.1 In this chapter, I try to answer three main
questions:

• What are Kant’s views about love? More specifically, what place, if
any, is there for love in Kant’s own ethical theory?
• What is the best way of thinking about love from a contemporary
Kantian perspective?
• How well does this broadly Kantian approach to love reflect our
ordinary intuitions on these matters?

This chapter has three parts. First, in “Kant’s Views About Love and
Friendship”, I examine Kant’s views about love. In particular, I discuss his
account of moral versus non-moral love as found throughout his various
writings and show how this closely parallels his account of moral versus
non-moral friendship. Second, in “Some Contemporary Kantian
Approaches to Love and Friendship”, I look at some recent Kantian
accounts of both friendship (Neera Kapur Badhwar) and love (J. David
Velleman), highlighting how they go beyond, and in many ways arguably
improve upon, Kant’s own views via their appeal to Kant’s Formula of
Humanity. Lastly, in “Conclusion: Assessing Kantian Moral Love”, I dis-
cuss the overall merits of what I call ‘Kantian moral love’ as found in all of
these different approaches. I argue that while Kantian moral love may cor-
rectly identify, from the moral point of view, how we ought to act and
think when loving other people, it fails to provide a complete account of
love, crucially leaving out certain key elements from the wide range of lov-
ing relationships we find ourselves in, especially romantic love. That is,
while Kantian moral love might offer us a morally ideal way to love other
people, it falls short of capturing the full essence of love—mainly because
love is not simply a moral affair but also a matter of the heart.

1
By ‘Kantian’, I mean approaches that are broadly inspired by, even though sometimes
substantively modifying or even rejecting, various aspects of Kant’s own ethical views.
 2 MAKING ROOM FOR LOVE IN KANTIAN ETHICS 27

2.2   Kant’s Views About Love and Friendship

What are Kant’s views about love? This issue is complicated by the fact
that Kant identifies two very different kinds of love, what I will call ‘moral’
versus ‘non-moral’ or ‘natural’ love.2 We find this distinction in nearly all
of major ethical writings. For Kant, non-moral or natural love—or what he
refers to as amor complacentiae (‘love as a passion’)—has three main fea-
tures. First, it is grounded in our sensible as opposed to rational nature.
Kant describes such natural love as an ‘inclination’, a ‘propensity of sensa-
tion’, and a ‘matter of feeling’.3 Second, it disposes us to help others. As
Kant puts it in Lectures on Ethics Collins, natural love amounts to ‘well-­
wishing from inclination’ or ‘well-doing […] arising from the heart’.4 And
third, because it is a merely contingent inclination or feeling and thus for
Kant not under our direct voluntary control, we cannot be morally
required to possess and/or display such natural love in general—in keep-
ing with Kant’s famous dictum that ‘ought implies can’.5
By contrast, moral love—or what Kant calls amor benevolentiae (‘love as
benevolence’)—also has three features that are by and large opposites of
non-moral love. First, it is grounded in our rational as opposed to sensible
nature—or, as Kant puts it in Lectures on Ethics Collins, ‘arises from prin-
ciples of the understanding’.6 Second and third, while moral love also
leads us to help others, it does not merely dispose but rather morally obli-
gates or requires us to do so. As Kant claims, moral love consists in ‘benev-
olence on principle’, ‘beneficence from duty itself’, ‘love from duty’,
‘well-doing from obligation’, and, more generally, a moral ‘command-
ment’ to be beneficent which ‘does not leave it to one’s discretionary
choice to make this one’s principle’.7 In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant

2
Kant refers to such love as ‘pathological’ (pathologische), by which he means related to
pa-thos, that is, to our passive, sensible natures, as opposed to being abnormal or diseased.
In order to express Kant’s idea in a more neutral way, I have adopted the terminology ‘natu-
ral love’. For some helpful general discussions of Kant on love and friendship, see Paton
1993, Baron 2002, and Sensen 2013.
3
Gr. 4: 399, KpV 5: 83, and MdS 6: 402. Note: All Kant references are to volume and
page numbers found in Immanuel Kants Schriften (Ausgabe der königlich preussischen
Akademie Wis-senshaften (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1902–)).
4
VE 27: 413.
5
See Gr. 4: 399, KpV 5: 83, MdS 6: 402 – cf. Rel. 6: 51 for Kant’s discussion of his famous
doctrine that ‘ought implies can’.
6
VE 27: 413.
7
VE 27: 413. For a Kantian account of love which rejects Kant’s own emphasis on benefi-
cence, see Ebels-Duggan 2008.
28 E. V. GARCIA

identifies what he calls our ‘duties of love’ as beneficence, gratitude, and

sympathy, where by the latter he does not mean a merely passive or recep-
tive feeling that we cannot directly control, but rather an active willingness
to be open to and share in the feelings of others.8
Kant offers a concise summary of this overall distinction between what
I am calling moral versus non-moral or natural love in the Groundwork,
writing:

It is in this way, no doubt, that we are to understand the passages from

Scripture that contain the command to love one’s neighbor, even our enemy.
For love as inclination cannot be commanded, but beneficence from duty
itself—even if no inclination whatsoever impels us to it, indeed if natural and
unconquerable aversion resists—is practical and not pathological love, which
lies in the will and not in the propensity of sensation, in principles of action and
not in melting compassion; and only the former can be commanded. (empha-
sis added)9

Notably, we find a parallel distinction in Kant’s treatment of friendship.

Following Aristotle, Kant distinguishes between three basic kinds of
friendship: two non-moral kinds of friendship, namely, (1) friendship
based on need and (2) friendship based on taste or what Kant calls ‘aes-
thetic friendship’ and (3) friendship based on a moral attitude, or moral
friendship. While this distinction involves many similar contrasts—for
example, non-moral friendship is based on feelings, whereas moral friend-
ship is based on reason; non-moral friendship cannot be morally required
of us, whereas moral friendship can, and so forth—moral friendship differs
from moral love for Kant in one important respect, namely, it incorporates
elements of both love and respect. In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant draws
a famous analogy between the two fundamental forces of repulsion and
attraction in our physical world and the two fundamental principles that
govern our ‘moral world’, namely, respect which makes us ‘keep our dis-
tance’ from other people and love which ‘brings us closer to them’.10 In
general, moral friendship is more complex than moral love insofar as it
involves both forces. That is, as Kant writes, moral friendship is ‘the union
of two persons through equal mutual love and respect’.11 For Kant, moral

8
MdS 6: 452–479.
9
Gr. 4: 399.
10
MdS 6: 469.
11
MdS 6: 470.
 2 MAKING ROOM FOR LOVE IN KANTIAN ETHICS 29

friendship requires not only being lovingly concerned about and sharing
in each other’s well-being but also respecting the autonomy of the other
person, all of this performed on mutually equal terms. Nevertheless,
despite this key difference, the main parallel remains the same. In general,
Kant sees a stark divide between moral and non-moral versions of love and
friendship, a highly dualistic approach which reflects the more fundamen-
tal division between reason and our empirical nature in his broader ethi-
cal theory.

2.3   Some Contemporary Kantian Approaches

to Love and Friendship

In this section, I discuss some recent Kantian approaches to friendship

(Badhwar) and love (Velleman). What is most striking about these
approaches is that they largely ignore Kant’s official views about love and
friendship, including his distinction between moral and non-moral ver-
sions of both phenomena. Instead, they notably take as their starting point
an attractive feature of Kant’s ethics that we have not yet discussed: namely,
Kant’s well-known ‘Formula of Humanity’ (FH). According to FH, we
ought to ‘treat humanity, in your own person as well as the person of any
other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means’.12
What does Kant mean by FH? To explain this, we need to answer two
questions: (i) what does it mean to treat ourselves or other people as what
Kant calls an ‘end-in-itself’ as opposed to a ‘mere means’?; and (ii) what
exactly does Kant mean by ‘humanity’? First, what does it mean to treat
somebody as an ‘end-in-itself’ versus as a ‘mere means’? To take a con-
crete example, consider how we treat something like, say, a tool such as a
hammer, as a ‘mere means’. There are at least three basic attitudes involved.
In general, we regard this object as:

1a. having merely instrumental value, that is, we value it solely for what it
can achieve or do for us
1b. replaceable/fungible, that is, as simply interchangeable with any other
equivalent thing
1c. merely conditionally valuable, that is, its value varies depending on
changing external circumstances (e.g., we would regard it as no longer
valuable if, say, we have already achieved or given up our original end)
12
Gr. 4: 429.
30 E. V. GARCIA

By contrast, Kant insists that we ought to treat ‘ends-in-themselves’ in

an exactly opposite way. That is, we should regard them as:

2a. having non-instrumental or final value, that is, we value them simply
for their own sake as opposed to what they can achieve or do for us
2b. irreplaceable/non-fungible, that is, as somehow special or distinctive in
its own right as opposed to something we would simply treat as
exchangeable for some equivalent thing
2c. unconditionally valuable, that is, where it has an intrinsic value which
stays the same regardless of changing external circumstances

Second, what does Kant mean by ‘humanity’? In general, Kant identi-

fies ‘humanity’ with our rational nature or, more specifically, our rational
capacity to set and pursue ends for ourselves.13 On one traditional con-
strual—as represented above in Williams’ reading of Kant—‘humanity’
refers to our bare abstract rational nature to the exclusion of all those
particular traits which distinguish us as unique individuals. Seen this way,
critics like Robert Noggle and Robin Dillon argue that Kant actually
‘ignores’ persons in his moral theory insofar as a person is ‘much more
than a mere instance of rational agency’ but a ‘being with a particular life,
a particular psychology, and a particular set of attachments, goals, com-
mitments, and so on’ (Noggle 1999: 454) and so should be treated not
merely ‘as instances of generic personhood, but as the whole fully specific
person she is’, taking into account ‘precisely [those] contingencies that
make me who I am’ (Dillon 1992: 74).14 By contrast, both of the thinkers
discussed later reject this traditional construal, instead insisting that treat-
ing people as ‘ends-in-themselves’ not only allows for, but indeed requires,
seeing other people in their full particularity.
To summarize: In unpacking Kant’s FH, we have seen that treating the
‘humanity’ of other people as ‘ends-in-themselves’ involves regarding
their rational agency as being non-instrumentally and unconditionally
valuable as well as in some sense irreplaceable, and acting accordingly. In
the rest of this section, I discuss how Badhwar and Velleman directly apply
Kant’s FH to analyze friendship and love. More specifically, I want to
explore the following question: How does viewing friends and people we
love as Kantian ‘ends-in-themselves’ transform the way we think about the

13
See Gr. 4: 428, Rel. 6: 26, and MdS 6: 392.
14
For a detailed defense of Kant on these matters, see Garcia 2012.
 2 MAKING ROOM FOR LOVE IN KANTIAN ETHICS 31

nature of friendship and love in general? In “Conclusion: Assessing Kantian

Moral Love”, I conclude by critically evaluating the respective merits of
Kant’s own view vis-à-vis these more contemporary Kantian approaches to
friendship and love.
In her classic article ‘Friends as Ends in Themselves’, Neera Kapur
Badhwar straightforwardly claims that we should regard friends as Kantian
‘ends-in-themselves’. What does this amount to? Badhwar argues that in
an ideal moral friendship, we should not view our friends as ‘mere means’
related to those ‘incidental features that make her useful or pleasurable’
(Badhwar 1989: 166). Instead, we should see them as having ‘an intrinsic,
not instrumental value’ as well as being ‘a unique and irreplaceable indi-
vidual’ on ‘account of what she essentially is’ (Badhwar 1989: 165),
directly corresponding to (2a) and (2b). Further, our love for our friends
should not vary relative to merely external changing circumstances. As
Badhwar puts it, following Shakespeare, our love for our friends ‘is not
love if it alters whenever it alteration finds’ (Badhwar 1989: 169), thus cor-
responding to (2c). However, unlike what she takes to be the type of
‘unconditional’ agapeistic love which loves someone totally independently
of their specific qualities—say, merely in virtue of their being a ‘Human
Being or Instance of (some F)’, for example, a rational agent—Badhwar
maintains that the true object of our love should be the ‘unique’, ‘irre-
placeable’, and ‘historical’ individual (Badhwar 1989: 169).
In his highly influential discussion ‘Love as a Moral Emotion’, J. David
Velleman likewise argues that truly loving people involves seeing them as
Kantian end-in-themselves. Velleman rejects traditional accounts of love as
a mere feeling, à la non-moral Kantian love, or as a drive or desire, à la
Freud and many contemporary analytic philosophers. Instead, Velleman
sees love as a special mode of attention and valuation (Velleman 2006: 76,
85–86). In particular, love consists in regarding our beloved—in an explic-
itly Kantian sense—as an ‘end’, where this amounts to ‘awareness of a
value inhering in’ the person herself (Velleman 2006: 94). For Velleman,
this involves valuing other people in a non-instrumental manner, not as
‘an independent aim to be realized’ but rather as something that we sim-
ply ‘act for the sake of’ (Velleman 2006: 89–90), in keeping with (2a). In
addition, Velleman thinks that we should regard the beloved as having
‘dignity’ or ‘incomparable value’ in Kant’s sense, where what makes some-
one ‘truly irreplaceable is a value that commands appreciation for it as it is
in itself, without comparison to anything else, and hence without substitu-
tions’ (Velleman 2006: 99–100), in keeping with (2b).
32 E. V. GARCIA

Lastly, to appreciate how Velleman incorporates (2c) in his account of

love, we need to look more closely at how he thinks about the object of
love, that is, the beloved. With Kant’s FH obviously in mind, Velleman
claims that the true object of love is the other person’s ‘humanity’ or their
‘rational nature’ (Velleman 2006: 100). However, by ‘rational nature’,
Velleman does not mean just our intellects, but rather our ‘capacity of
appreciation or valuation’ more broadly, or put simply, ‘the core of our
reflective concern’ in terms of ‘our capacity to love’ itself (Velleman 2006:
100). In this way, loving another person amounts to our heart ‘respond[ing]
to […] another heart’ (Velleman 2006: 100). Nonetheless, while our love
is grounded in the ‘universal value’ that the beloved has simply in virtue of
‘being a person’ or an ‘instance of rational nature’, the way we necessarily
come to respond to this value is by loving their concrete ‘empirical per-
sona’. This persona can include various ‘observable features’ about them
like the way they talk or walk, or even how they wear their hat or sip their
tea, which we take to be ‘external symbols or reminders’ of their internal
value as persons which they retain regardless of any changing external
circumstances (Velleman 2006: 100, 106), thus in keeping with (2c).

2.4   Conclusion: Assessing Kantian Moral Love

What should we think about what I will broadly call ‘Kantian moral love’,
where this is meant to include both Kant’s account of moral love spelled
out in terms of ‘duties of love’ and contemporary Kantian approaches
which see love as a ‘moral emotion’? In particular, how does (1) Kant’s
official historical view, which insists upon a sharp dichotomy between
feeling-­based ‘non-moral’ versus reason-based ‘moral’ friendship and love,
measure up against (2) various contemporary Kantian approaches, accord-
ing to which both friends and people we love are best understood as
Kantian ‘ends-in-themselves’ in terms of being non-instrumentally and
unconditionally valuable and in some sense irreplaceable or special in their
own right?
On the one hand, I think that contemporary Kantian approaches sig-
nificantly improve upon Kant’s original views in two main ways. First,
unlike Kant’s approach, they appeal to Kant’s FH to analyze the nature of
love. This is a major advantage not only because many commentators
regard FH as one of the most appealing aspects of Kant’s ethical theory,
insofar as it identifies a highly attractive moral ideal—namely, treating peo-
ple as ends-in-themselves with a fundamental dignity—that many seem to
 2 MAKING ROOM FOR LOVE IN KANTIAN ETHICS 33

think underlies our modern-day conceptions of basic human rights. In

addition, it also puts the emphasis in the right place when it comes to
Kantian moral love. It turns our attention away from what Kant himself
focuses on in his own account of moral love, namely, our acting from
moral principle in terms of fulfilling our ‘duties of love’ such as benefi-
cence and gratitude. Instead, it highlights what seems to be the true object
of moral love, namely, people themselves understood in terms of their basic
‘humanity’.
Second and relatedly, such contemporary Kantian approaches are much
more akin to how we ordinarily think about love. In contrast to the type
of universalistic love involved with Kant’s moral duties of love that we owe
to all people in general—which might be more suitably called ‘philan-
thropy’, that is, ‘love of humanity’ in a very literal sense—these contem-
porary Kantian approaches instead demand that we attend to the
individuality of those we love. By focusing on the beloved as a ‘unique’,
‘irreplaceable’, and ‘historical’ individual (Badhwar 1989: 69) or in terms
of their concrete ‘empirical persona’ and the various ways that we ‘respond
to [their] value through that persona’ (Velleman 2006: 107), such con-
temporary approaches to love—unlike Kant’s own view—instruct us to
embrace the full concrete historical particularity of those we love, includ-
ing our special relationships with them.
On the other hand, I think that there is something deeply problematic
about such contemporary Kantian approaches if they claim to offer a full
analysis of the essence of love as such. We can see this most clearly in
Velleman’s synopsis of his view, when he writes: ‘All that is essential to love,
in my view, is that it disarms our emotional defenses towards an object in
response to its incomparable value as a self-existent end’ (Velleman 2006:
99, emphasis added). What should we think about Velleman’s claim that
what is ‘essential’ to love is how it emotionally disarms us in response to
some incomparably valuable end-in-itself? The main problem is that
Velleman’s account—which is open to two very different interpretations—
seems to face a fundamental dilemma.
On one horn of the dilemma, related to what I will call a ‘weak reading’
of Velleman, we can interpret him as merely claiming that, in love, (1) we
necessarily make ourselves emotionally vulnerable in response to another
person and (2) if Kant’s ethical views are true, then we are directly
responding to a person who is end-in-itself with incomparable value
regardless of whether we are actually aware of this or not. Both (1) and (2)
seem correct, perhaps even trivially so. The basic worry is that, taken
34 E. V. GARCIA

together, they do not establish Velleman’s substantive thesis that (3) love
is a ‘moral emotion’. In fact, it (1) seems to be just a non-moral truism
about love (viz., that in love, we invariably make ourselves emotionally
vulnerable in response to another person), whereas (2) is just a doctrinal
truism about Kant’s ethics (viz., that if Kant’s view is true, then people we
love are ends-in-themselves with incomparable value). However, affirming
the mere conjunction of the non-moral truism related to (1) and the moral
truism related to (2) in no way establishes Velleman’s quite substantive
thesis that (3) love is an inherently moral emotion.
On the other horn of the dilemma, related to what I will call a ‘strong
reading’ of Velleman, he is instead claiming that, in love, (1’) we make
ourselves emotionally vulnerable in response to another person and (2’)
this response necessarily involves our awareness of the other person as an
end-in-itself with incomparable value. This reading squares better with
Velleman’s own description of both respect and love, where he argues that
the former involves ‘awareness of a value that arrests our self-love’, while
the latter involves ‘awareness of a value that arrests […] our tendencies
toward emotional self-protection from another person’—where the ‘value’
that we are aware of in both cases, as discussed earlier, is the ‘universal
value’ of our ‘humanity’ understood as ‘a capacity of appreciation or valu-
ation’ (Velleman 2006: 95, 100–101). While I think that this interpreta-
tion fits much better with Velleman’s text than the weak reading, the main
problem is that it seems to involve a highly implausible account of what is
‘essential’ to love. Put differently, Velleman fails to identify either neces-
sary or sufficient conditions for love here.
First, Velleman fails to identify sufficient conditions for love. That is,
even if we fulfill conditions (1’) and (2’), this still does not guarantee that
we are actually loving the person in question. To give just a few examples,
it seems possible that, à la Velleman, (1’) I make myself emotionally vul-
nerable to X and (2’) that I recognize and respond to X’s value as an ‘end-­
in-­itself’ based on their ‘capacity of appreciation or valuation’, but I do
not actually love X but am instead merely:

a) making an appeal to X’s fellow humanity to provide aid when I

am in need
b) asking for X to show mercy and refrain from harming me because X is
an aggressor
c) soliciting X to join me in some worthwhile moral cause
d) simply liking X as a person and enjoying spending time with them
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
camp the picture of offended dignity. He himself had not brought
even so much as a sweet potato, so that we were the more abrupt in
our refusal. After his departure some of his elders and the
Wandorobbo stayed with us for an hour or so for a chat. They gave
us the general news of the district, and among other items of more or
less doubtful veracity, they included an impossible yarn about some
cannibal dwarfs who had visited Maranga since our stay in that
place. They described them as “watu wafupi sana” (“very short
men”), and indicated, by holding their hands that distance above the
ground, that they were about four feet in height. They further stated
that these dwarfs came to Maranga to buy people that they might eat
them. We cross-examined them closely, for we did not at all believe
their story. They were asked where these dwarfs came from. That
question rather stumped them, but after a few moments’ cogitation
they hit on the furthest place they could think of. “They came from
beyond Mombasa!” said they.
On receiving this reply, we were convinced that the story was a
pure fabrication, and said as much. They only smiled and changed
the subject. We inquired at Maranga afterwards, and were confirmed
in our opinion as to their untruthfulness. It is very strange that they
should find so much amusement in such senseless and purposeless
lies, though, to be sure, the practice is not wholly confined to the
African native.
It rained hard all night, and the whole of the next day, so that
travelling was impossible. We spent the day playing dominoes, going
outside at intervals to watch the sheep die, and to grumble at our
bad luck. It rained also all the next night and the greater part of the
next morning; but it cleared sufficiently at midday to enable us to
proceed. We therefore made a three-hour march and again camped.
The clay paths were very steep and extremely slippery after the rain,
causing us no small amount of trouble, while the sick and wearied
sheep stumbled about in a most distressing manner.
After we had camped, I and the guide went on ahead for an hour
or two in order to prospect the morrow’s road. To my great delight I
saw Doenyo Sabuk, away in the distance to the south-east, and
further to the south I saw the summits of the hills behind Nairobi,
which lay rather less than sixty miles away. It seemed very strange
to me to reflect that I was standing in the heart of Kikuyuland amid a
would-be hostile people, to all intents and purposes as far away from
civilization as if I was at the North Pole, and where at any moment a
dispute over a stolen sheep would resolve itself into a desperate and
pitiless fight for life; while there, scarcely sixty miles away, and on
this side of the range of hills which seemed so near, lay Nairobi with
its houses, its railway workshops, locomotives, Baboo clerks and
ticket collectors, and all the varied and busy life of a modern colonial
town.
During the night it rained again, and killed off some more of the
sheep. We started early in the morning in the hope of reaching
Maranga the same day, a hope, however, we did not realize.
The A’kikuyu made themselves rather obnoxious on the road, and
one or two shots were fired by our men. A calf and sheep were
stolen, the thieves getting clear away with their booty into the thick
bush. If we had let the matter pass we should have had further
trouble on the next march, so when we camped we sent for the chief
of the district. When he appeared we informed him of the
circumstance, and intimated at the same time that we should like to
see him stay in our camp until the stolen property was restored. This
apparently did not at all coincide with his ideas, as he immediately
made a dash for liberty, meanwhile shouting to his warriors, of whom
there were a great number in the camp, who disappeared into the
surrounding bush like shadows. We had, however, anticipated just
such a move on his part, and at a signal from us, Barri, the Somali,
seized the chief and secured him, and I was under the painful
necessity of handcuffing him to the tent-pole and putting a sentry
over him. He then took quite a different view of the case, and
despatched messengers, whom we had allowed into camp for that
purpose, to the people who had stolen our animals. An hour or two
afterwards the messengers returned with the missing beasts, and
they were handed over to us with profuse apologies. We thereupon
released the chief, telling him not to do it again, though, as a matter
of fact, he did not know of the theft till we ourselves so abruptly
informed him of it. We could not, however, but hold him responsible
for any indiscretion committed by his people. On his release, in order
to show him that we bore no malice, we presented him with a bead
necklace and a coloured cloth, and asked him to bring us some
sweet potatoes and yams, and anything else in the vegetable line
that he might wish to present to us, which he promised to do. He
accordingly returned in the evening with a supply of vegetables and
a dark brown fat-tailed Kikuyu sheep as a present. In return we
presented him with a couple of Rendili sheep, with which he was
delighted.
The chief informed us that Maranga was only one march away and
that the road was good, and, in addition, he himself would
accompany us thither, in order to prevent any more of our property
being stolen. He was as good as his word, and at eight o’clock the
next morning we resumed our journey. Just before we started I took
a photograph of Mount Kenia as it lay fully exposed to view in the
half-light of the early morning of a dull day. The result is not all that
could be desired, but it will give a very fair idea of the aspect of the
mountain from the south-west.
We found the road as steep and slippery as on the previous day,
and it tried the animals exceedingly. For that reason we made a
short march and camped at half-past ten.
Soon after the tents were pitched, our old friend Manga and his
son Koranja appeared. They had heard of our approach and had
come to meet us. They greeted us very heartily, expressing delighted
surprise at our safe return. We spent the rest of the day in discussing
the news with them.
During the afternoon the chief of the surrounding district who
answered to the name of Simba (lion), came into camp, and,
following the example of his neighbour, our friend of yesterday,
brought with him a sheep and some vegetables as a present. He
received a couple of Rendili sheep in return, and we parted with
mutual good wishes.
The next morning we marched straight into Maranga and camped
beside a brook, which ran into the Tana about half a mile further
down. Owing to the heavy rains we surmised that there would be a
lot of water in the Tana; even in this small brook the water was
breast high, with a current almost powerful enough to sweep one
bodily away. The natives affirmed that it would be impossible to cross
the Tana for at least three weeks, and perhaps longer. Accordingly
after lunch I went on to the Tana accompanied by two men, in order
to see for myself. My first view of the river was a revelation. It was
extraordinarily high, the constant heavy rains having greatly swelled
its volume; and it is not a small river at any time. The ford was under
six feet of water, with a muddy brown current swirling and eddying
past at a speed of between four and five miles an hour. It would have
been utterly impossible to cross with our loads and animals until the
flood had considerably subsided, and meanwhile the rain showed no
sign of ceasing. I returned to camp thoroughly dispirited.
On the way back I passed a magnificent waterfall which I had not
previously heard of. The whole volume of the river roared and
tumbled in great masses of foam over the naked black rock, plunging
down some twelve or fifteen feet in a yeasty smother, accompanied
by a thunderous roar which effectually precluded any attempt at
conversation in the immediate vicinity. At the foot of the fall the water
boiled and swirled in a great pool. Waves several feet high were
thrown against each other by the violence of the water, which was
seemingly gathering strength for its fierce mad rush through the only
outlet from the pool, a narrow channel with perpendicular sides, and
about 60 feet across, cut through the solid rock. Large rugged trees
hung over the falls and round the edges of the pool, their leaves
dripping moisture from the hissing clouds of spray cast high in the air
upon every side, the whole forming a scene of savage grandeur,
wonderfully impressive, and not easily forgotten.
 CHAPTER XXI.
(CONCLUSION.)

FROM THE RIVER TANA TO NAIROBI.

Arrival at the Tana river—A visit to M’biri—Crossing the Tana—

Smallpox—I give Ramathani a fright—Peculiar method of
transporting goods across the river practised by the Maranga—
Kati drowned—The safari across—M’biri—Disposal of the sheep
—We resume the march—The Maragua once more—The Thika-
Thika—The swamps—Kriger’s Farm—Nairobi.
Early the next morning we sallied forth from our tents and spent an
hour and a half in the water of the brook, getting the sheep across.
They were unable to face the stream, and each separate animal
required to be passed across from hand to hand, the labour involved
being very great. We then went on to the Tana and camped beside
the ford. In the afternoon we got our Alpine rope out, and with
considerable trouble and some risk succeeded in getting one end of
it across the river and made fast to a tree on the opposite bank,
Jumbi with two or three other men and myself swimming across the
river for the purpose.
It was not until I was actually in the water that I realized the
tremendous power of the current. We had to go a long way up
stream before plunging in, as the swift current carried us rapidly
down river, and, but for this precaution, would have swept us past
the only landing-place on the other side. This made rather a long
swim of it. I was horribly afraid of the presence of crocodiles, but
fortunately they were conspicuous by their absence.
When at last, after many failures, we had got the rope across, it
was not of much assistance, as the water was too deep for the
porters, and the animals would not face it alone on any
consideration. Another circumstance which added to our difficulties
was there being only one landing-place on the opposite bank, a little
gully about four feet wide in the steep bank, made by the
hippopotamus who formerly came ashore here to feed, and
afterwards widened by natives using the ford. If by mischance
anybody had been swept past this landing-place they would almost
certainly have been drowned, as there was no other place to land for
a long way down the river.
Failing a bridge, our chances of getting across the Tana for
another month were very slender, and as I was anxious to reach Mr.
Hall’s station at M’biri in order to get a few newspapers, some
tobacco, and provisions, I sent word to the chief’s son, Koranja, that I
required a couple of guides. These he had great difficulty in
procuring, the natives declaring that it was impossible to cross the
river. However, on the promise of a heavy reward of cloth, I prevailed
upon two of the Maranga natives to accompany me. We three then
swam the Tana together, with my clothing done up in small bundles
on our heads. I was unable to get my rifle across, so I went without
it. Once on the other side, I dressed as speedily as possible, and we
set off at a good pace for M’biri.
We reached the Marathwa, another fair-sized river, an hour later,
which necessitated stripping again. The crossing safely
accomplished we resumed our apparel, and set off once more,
reaching the station at midday, after a couple of hours’ rough tramp
over the hills.
Mr. and Mrs. Hall were away shooting for a day or two, but Captain
Longfield, who was in charge of the troops, made me very welcome.
He invited me to stay with him until Mr. Hall’s return, an invitation I
gladly accepted. I sent the two guides back to the camp with a
supply of newspapers and provisions, and then sat down with
Captain Longfield to one of the most satisfactory luncheons I have
ever enjoyed. It was such a pleasing change to eat once more from
earthenware plates, with a real white tablecloth and glass tumblers
on the table, and a properly furnished cruet-stand. It is only after one
has been separated for a time from the minor conveniences of
civilization that one discovers how much they contribute to one’s
comfort.
 One of the most peculiar effects of our late experiences was
noticeable when I retired to rest that night. It was the new and
strange sense of security. It seemed so utterly unbelievable that I
could go to sleep and sleep as soundly as I liked, without fear of
being rudely disturbed by hostile natives, or by prowling beasts of
prey. It was positively difficult to realize at first.
On the afternoon of the second day of my stay at the station Mr.
and Mrs. Hall returned. Mr. Hall had done wonders with the station
during the short time (about two months) that he had been
established there. A very large and solid stone wall surrounded the
various buildings and offices, and a ditch had been dug outside,
making it, perched as it was on the summit of a hill, a very strong
and secure position. The huts were lofty and well built, and in the
centre of the compound a large and handsome flagstaff carried the
flag of the East African Protectorate.
Next morning I returned to our camp on the Tana, where I found
that El Hakim and George had succeeded in getting a good many of
the sheep across, having employed a number of the Maranga to
swim them over, two men to one sheep—a very slow process at
best. The river had fallen a few inches, but it would need to fall at
least another foot before the men could attempt the passage with
their loads.
The day after, as the river was still falling, we got the remainder of
the sheep to the other side. Almost before they were across, the
river commenced to rise again, and consequently we could not
attempt to move the cattle or loads.
In the afternoon about seventy Wakamba, driven northwards by
famine, came to the opposite bank of the river and attempted to
cross over to Maranga by means of our rope. They were extremely
emaciated, and so weak that three or four of the first dozen were
washed away from the rope and drowned. Suddenly the Maranga
who were watching them raised a shrill cry of “Ndui! Ndui!” (small-
pox), and rushing at those of the Wakamba who had already landed,
they drove them into the water and across the river again. It seemed
hard to repulse the poor starving wretches, but the Maranga have
already suffered so heavily from the small-pox that they had no wish
to repeat the experience. There were quite a dozen of the Wakamba
in an advanced stage of confluent small-pox. From our camp we
could hear them moaning and wailing all night, for several nights. In
the daytime they used to come down to the only place at which they
could reach the water, a large flat rock a little way up stream, which
was just awash, where they would sit for hours laving themselves
with the cool water.
Three days later, on November 22nd, we found that the river had
gone down some six inches, and we made a determined effort to get
the loads and cattle across.
Stripping to my shirt, I swam across the river to superintend
operations at the landing-place on the opposite bank, I took four or
five men, and we stood in the water up to our breasts, under the
bank, where the current was a little less violent, and took the loads
from the porters, who were exhausted by their struggle with the
powerful current, as they brought them across. Young Koranja
annoyed me by bringing my camera across under water, but then he
was not very tall, and consequently received a ducking every time
the rope surged. If he had not had my camera, I should have been
highly amused at his predicament.
The better to shout instructions across the river, I climbed a large
tree that grew on the bank, its topmost branches hanging out over
the water for some yards. I found such a comfortable seat in the fork,
about twelve feet above the surface of the water, that I stayed there
for awhile to rest after the laborious work at the landing-place, and
also to get a bird’s-eye view of all that was going on.
Presently I heard some one swimming, with much puffing and
blowing, down the river, and almost underneath me. Peering through
the leafy screen that surrounded me, I saw that Ramathani, though
evidently in mortal terror, had at last faced the river, and was
swimming slowly and cautiously down stream to the landing-place.
The current was bringing him directly under my perch, though he had
not observed me, and I derived much amusement from the anxious
expression on his usually calm and expressionless visage. As he
passed underneath something suddenly impelled me to jump out of
the tree, and I did so, landing with a terrific splash right upon my
unfortunate servitor. He gave a fearful shriek, which was almost
instantaneously stifled in a gurgle as he disappeared beneath the
surface. When he came up again his face wore such a look of terror
that I half repented of the joke. The way his face changed when he
found me swimming quietly by his side, smiling cheerfully, was a
perfect study in expression.
“Oh, it was you, Bwana?” he gasped out. “I thought it was an
afreet” (devil) “or a kiboko” (hippopotamus).
I then challenged him to a race across the river, but he declined,
though ordinarily he was a good swimmer. He had had enough of the
water for one day, he said.
When I got down to the landing-place, I found that most of the
loads were across, our men having been reinforced by some of the
Maranga. These natives disdained the rope, and, strange to say,
though many of them could not swim, they could carry a 60 lb. load
across a ford 6 feet deep, though their own height rarely exceeded 5
feet 6 inches, and usually a great deal less. They surmounted the
difficulty in a rather ingenious manner, which at the same time
required no small skill.
They held the loads over their heads the full length of their arms,
and then walked into the river, some little distance up-stream. When
they got out of their depth they walked on the bottom, giving a jump
which brought their heads above water, when they wanted to
breathe. The heavy load held above their heads enabled them to
keep steady, in an upright position, in the swift current. They
consequently crossed the river in a series of jumps, the current
meanwhile carrying them down stream, while between the jumps
they walked a step or two towards the other side. It was a very
curious sight from the bank to see a large box or a rolled-up tent,
clasped by two black hands, apparently crossing the river of its own
accord. Our own men would not attempt this method at any price.
The loads were got across before midday, but it was extremely
hard and hazardous work, one of our best men, an N’yamwezi
named Kati, being unfortunately washed away and drowned.
In the afternoon, all the loads being across, George and I and a
dozen of the men unshipped the rope, and taking it further up-
stream, we prepared to get the cattle and donkeys across. After
chasing away the small-pox patients, we took up our station on the
flat rock already mentioned, as it was the most suitable place that we
could find, at which to land the cattle. By means of our old device of
tying a rope round the necks of the animals and hauling them bodily
across, we safely accomplished the task, though the labour was
enormous. Several of the cows were nearly drowned, and after we
had hauled them out of the water, lay on the rock to all appearance
dead. Some one suggested that perhaps artificial respiration would
facilitate their recovery, but as neither George or I knew how to
perform artificial respiration on a cow, we were unable to put it to the
proof. They eventually recovered without such aid, and rising slowly
and with difficulty they walked away, though I must confess that they
were very groggy on their pins.
At nine o’clock next morning, having thus, after a delay of only
eight days, safely negotiated the Tana, we started on our final march
to Nairobi. We crossed the Marathwa below M’biri, where it was
breast deep and very swift, camping on the opposite bank. We
stopped there four days, during which time we sold the sheep to
some Somalis who had a store just outside the Government station.
El Hakim went on a visit to Mr. Hall, and stayed a day or two with
him. I took to my blankets on the third day with a slight touch of
fever, which, considering that I had practically lived in the water for
four days, was not surprising.
On the morning of November 27th, we broke camp and resumed
our march, exceedingly thankful that we were no longer handicapped
on the march by the presence of the sheep. I was still rather shaky
after my touch of fever, so I rode the big mule for the first time since
leaving the Green Camp on the Waso Nyiro. The next day we
reached the Maragua, where we found a rough bridge, which had
been constructed by Captain Skene, who was on his way to M’biri to
relieve Captain Longfield. The latter had been ordered to Kismayu to
take part in the Ogaden Somali Expedition which was to avenge
Major Jenner’s murder. We crossed safely, and camped on the other
side. Three cows were stolen during the afternoon by the A’kikuyu,
but we sent Jumbi and half a dozen men immediately in pursuit, and
they recovered them without difficulty.
Four days later we reached the river Thika-Thika. Congoni once
more appeared on the scene, and we were able to shoot several for
food, and I also secured a roan antelope, the first we had seen
during the trip. Besides congoni there were numbers of zebras,
wildebeeste, wart-hog, grantei, and thompsonei; and George and I,
taking turns with the shot-gun, managed to secure some guinea-
fowl, and occasionally a wild duck.
Very heavy rain the night before we reached the Thika-Thika
delayed us a little. We reached the river at midday and found it full of
water, but the current was comparatively sluggish. We saw a couple
of hippo, and any number of crocodiles.
At a place where a fallen tree projected some way over the water
we constructed a rude bridge, resting the centre of the structure
upon a small island in the stream. It was not beautiful to look upon,
neither was it over strong; but it sufficed, and during the afternoon
the whole safari crossed by its means. The cattle were driven further
down the river to a spot where the banks shelved somewhat, and
they were then swum across, luckily without interference from any
too inquisitive crocodiles.
The next day was George’s turn to have a touch of fever, which,
though slight, made him very uncomfortable. We were now entering
a very marshy piece of country, traversed by numerous rivers and
streams, which drained into the Athi River.
Congoni were again numerous, and we were able to shoot
sufficient meat to feed the men. The congoni is remarkably tenacious
of life, one beast in particular giving me a lot of trouble. I put two
·303 soft-nosed bullets into it; and although one hind leg was broken,
and it was also badly wounded in the shoulder, it made off at a good
speed. Taking the Martini, I followed it, and, when it once more
stopped, I put a Martini bullet into it from behind, at a hundred-yards’
range. The bullet struck it in the hind quarters, and ploughed its way
through almost the whole length of the animal’s body. The beast was
unable to advance, but still kept its feet; and as I was unwilling to
waste another cartridge upon it, I walked up to it and threw it down
by seizing its horns and jerking its head sharply sideways, but not
until its throat was cut did it expire.
On December 5th we reached a papyrus swamp, about two
hundred yards wide, but apparently continuing indefinitely east and
west, so that we could not march round it. The men, therefore, were
sent to cut a path through it, and by laying the cut reeds and a
quantity of branches of trees across the roots a precarious roadway
was constructed, perfectly practicable for the men and loads, but
impossible for cattle. Jumbi, who was sent out prospecting for a
suitable place to get the cattle across, returned in the evening,
having discovered a place some miles away, which he thought they
might safely negotiate. Accordingly, before sunrise next morning, he
was sent with the cattle to make the attempt, while the porters and
loads crossed by the temporary path we had constructed the day
before. It was rather ticklish work, as in some places there was over
six feet of water under the reeds, we having to depend for support on
the elasticity of the cut reeds laid transversely across the roots, the
weaker places having been strengthened by the addition of branches
and brushwood well trodden down.
Jumbi was perfectly successful in getting the cattle across, and
they were on the other side of the swamp and opposite us some time
before all the men had crossed; but we were all across by ten
o’clock, and, resuming our nether garments, we proceeded. In an
hour we had reached a narrow river, flowing swiftly between two
upright walls of rock. A mile up-stream we discovered a crossing-
place at a spot just above a magnificent waterfall. This fall was quite
100 feet deep, and the water foamed and splashed into one of the
most beautiful glens imaginable. We did not stop to admire the
scenery. Personally, I was perfectly willing to exchange the prettiest
bit of scenery thereabouts for a sight of the Nairobi Post Office.
After we had left the river a few miles behind, we were confronted
by another wretched papyrus swamp. Yesterday’s experience was
repeated, a road having to be constructed in precisely the same
manner. It was not finished till sunset, so we camped for the night. It
rained hard in the evening, and during the night the mosquitos drove
us nearly frantic.
The next morning we crossed the swamp. It was rather deeper
than the other, and we had to strip to the “altogether” in order to get
across; the reeds often giving way under our weight, letting us down
with a splash into the ice-cold, dirty water. We got across, however,
without any serious mishap, and resuming our clothing we again
went on.
Three quarters of an hour later we struck yet another swamp. Off
came our clothes once more, and we waded it breast deep. The
water was very cold, and unspeakably stagnant and filthy. It took us
an hour to get across. Half an hour’s march further on, another
swamp appeared. Once more we had to strip and wade. This one
was not so cold, as the sun was by this time well up, and moreover
the water was cleaner; but there were a lot of horrible flies, like
horseflies, which bit most ferociously, and attacked every
unprotected portion of our anatomy, drawing blood at every bite.
However, that was the last of the swamps, and by four o’clock in the
afternoon we reached our old camp near Kriger’s farm, only seven
miles from Nairobi.
We camped for the night, and the following morning George and I
started for Nairobi. We left El Hakim in camp, as he wished to go
over and see Kriger during the morning. George and myself, with the
bulk of the men, therefore started on our seven-mile tramp. On the
way we critically examined each other, and a more ragged pair of
scarecrows one would not wish to see. The sole of one of my boots
had parted from the upper and flapped as I walked, while George
lacked a sole altogether on his left boot, and was walking on his
sock, which soon wore through, causing him so much inconvenience
as to materially impede our progress.
Such trifles, however, were unable to damp our ardour as we
tramped along in the direction of Nairobi. Each well remembered
spot recalling some incident or other. Here was the place where I fell
into the river the second night out. Further on was the clump of trees
where I shot the guinea-fowl, and beyond that, again, was the game-
pit which had bidden fair to put a summary end to my career over six
months before. What hardships they seemed at the time, though
subsequent events had dwarfed them into insignificance. Even our
stirring experiences on the Waso Nyiro and our long weeks of
anxiety in Kikuyuland seemed to suddenly recede into the limbo of
the past. Everything else was forgotten in the intoxicating thought
that at last we were almost home, and as we approached nearer to
Nairobi a feeling of elation impossible to describe took possession of
us. Pain, difficulties, anxieties—all were momentarily forgotten. Our
emotions were shared by the men, and when the first galvanized
roof appeared on the horizon a cheer broke forth, and we hurried
forward at increased speed.
Presently the railway station hove in sight, and a locomotive
shunting trucks in the goods-yard sent forth an ear-splitting whistle.
Never was there such a musical sound as that erstwhile discordant
speech. At length, to cut a long story short, we arrived, much to the
surprise of our friends, who had heard that we had all been killed in
Embe, the news of the Somali’s disaster having in some mysterious
manner filtered through.
I have only once since experienced such a sense of relief as I felt
on our arrival in Nairobi, and that is now, as I finish this account of
our journey; and my only hope is that it will not have wearied the
reader half as much as it wearied the writer.
 INDEX
Abdullah ben Asmani, 12
Abdallah Arahalli, 94
Abdullah ben Selim, death of, 128
Aberdare Range, 3, 338, 342
A’kikuyu, assisted by the, 50;
brawl with the, 60;
return to the, 343;
attempts at theft by the, 344;
sheep stolen by the, 347;
arrest of the chief of the, 348;
steal three cows, 359
Aloes, 135, 160, 333
Ants, attacked by, 113;
red, 158
Asmani ben Selim, 12, 324
Assala, 53
Athi river, 26;
fishing in the, 27, 33, 35;
in flood, 36;
crossing the, 37

Baazi, 53
Baboons, 197, 249, 252
Baobabs, 79
Barri leaves the Somali camp, 276;
is pursued, 277;
 is attacked by his pursuers, 277;
and shoots Ismail Robli, 278
Baringo, Lake, 4, 136
Bei Munithu, 84;
treachery of, 298;
insolence of, 316;
repentance of, 329
Bhotan, 94
Bilali, 14, 176
Blood-brotherhood, 84;
ceremony of, 113, 147
Borana country, 235;
people, 235
Buffalo hunt, 151;
herd of, 192;
horns destroyed by hyænas, 296
Burkeneji, nomadic habits of, 163;
first meeting with, 208;
village of, 209;
temerity of women of, 209;
chief of, 210;
belief in their weapons, 223;
dress, 223;
donkeys, 223;
insolence of, 224;
relations of, with the Rendili, 241

Camels, loss of the, 202;

reappearance of, 300
Camp on fire, 171
Cannibals, rumour of, 346
Carl Alexander Falls, 46
Castor-oil plant, 59
Chanjei Hills, 87;
character of people of, 87
Chanler, Mr. William Astor, F.R.G.S., 4, 88, 214, 226, 258, 265,
266
Chanler Falls, 203
Chiggers, 314, 329
“Cinder Heap”, 165
Congoni, 24;
The tenacity of life of, 359
Coja ben Sowah, 12
Crane, crested, 35
Crocodiles, 50, 212, 247;
immense size of, 254
Cumming, Gordon, 308

Dasturi, 331
Date palms, 175
Desertions, 20, 155, 259
Dhurra, 52
Dirito, 82;
arrival at village of, 82;
assists us to drive animals, 132;
treachery of, 298
Docere ben Ali, 12
Doenyo Sabuk, 18, 24;
in sight of once more, 347
Doenyo lol Deika, 136
Doenyo Ebor, 66
Doenyo Egere, 66
Donkeys, 16;
troubles with, 25, 38;
eaten by Wakamba, 137
Doti, measurement of a, 53
Doum palm, description of, 162

El Hakim, meeting with, 2;

and the Tomori people, 86;
robbery of goods of, 116;
experiences with elephants, 142;
shoots a rhinoceros, 185;
bitten by a scorpion, 245;
has a bright idea, 269;
adventure with a lion, 292;
shoots an elephant, 296
Elkonono, the, 315
Elephant, awkward meeting with an, 139;
hunting, 142-146, 296, 303
Elephant’s foot, 301, 310
Elgeyo, 136;
escarpment of, 137
Embe country, description of, 95;
the retreat from, 103;
explanation of reverse in, 110
Euphorbias, 333

Falls on the Tana River, 350

Falls, Chanler, 203
Falls, Carl Alexander, 46
Falls, Nairobi, 27
Falls, Sweinfurth, 46
Finlay and Gibbons, Messrs., disaster to, 17, 18, 57
Fire, difficulties with, 31;
camp on, 171;
grass, 188
Foa, Edward, F.R.G.S., 311
Forest, belt round Kenia, 84;
acacia, 90;
of North Kenia, 335
Formosa Bay, 4

Galla-land, 3
Game very numerous, 43;
vast herds of, 150, 172, 191;
scarcity of, 179;
absence of, 201
Game-pit, adventure in a, 21
George joins the expedition, 18;
takes a bath, 26;
sickness of, 33;
narrow escape of, 100;
illness of, 115;
drives hostile Wa’m’thara from camp, 134;
adventure with a rhinoceros, 267;
shoots a rhinoceros, 293
Giraffe hunt, 280, 285
Gilgil, 339
Gnainu, fight at, 118
Grant’s gazelle, good sport with, 294
Green Camp, 162, 188, 293
Gregory, Prof. J. W., D.Sc., 4, 180
Guinea fowl, 206
Hall, Mr., 49, 344
Hamisi ben Abdullah, 12;
death of, 128
Hannington, the late Bishop, 137
Hannington, Lake, 136
Hippopotamus, 54, 255;
an anxious moment, 261, 284, 287
Hohnel, Lieut. Ludwig von, 4, 213
Honey, 53
Hyænas, 296, 331

Igani, noisy reception in, 81

Imbe, entry into, 79;
chief of, 79;
audacious proposal of people of, 80
Impala, 296
Ismail Robli, 9;
appearance of, 93;
character of, 93;
murders N’Dominuki’s nephew, 100;
terror of, 106;
refuses to return to Embe, 113;
camped among the Rendili, 212;
grief of, 217;
letter to Nairobi of, 219;
his invitation, 269;
wounded by Barri, 288
Ivory, troubles of buying, 123, 129

Jamah Mahomet, 9;
refuses to cross M’bu, 57;
visit to, at Munithu, 83;
appearance of, 93;