Thirty-Three LOVE AND VIRTUE

Raja Halwani
This paper defends the platitude that love comes in degrees. The platitude is the answer I accept to the question of what connections exist between love and the virtues. The focus of my discussion is on the love between two intimate people, be they lovers or friends, not on agapic love, though I will mention some possible repercussions for unrequited love. The issue concerns a tension between two general claims. First is the claim that love is immune from ethical criticism; second is the claim that love is ethically structured. Call the first the immunity claim and the second the ethical claim. The second, if true, not only implies the falsity of the first, namely, that it is sometimes appropriate to bring ethical considerations to bear upon love, but also asserts something to the effect that our understanding of love would be seriously incomplete were ethical considerations not part of the explication of love. The immunity claim has its tradition. Theoreticians down the ages have tended to view love as morally neutral. Plato turned love into contemplation. Arthur Schopenhauer reduced it to mere sexual impulse hard to control. And Irving Singer declared that love is not inherently moral. Love has also been viewed as an emotion, often a wild and uncontrollable one, and as such has been considered antagonistic to reason. Indeed, the popular concept of love at first sight emphasizes this irrationality of love: a person can fall in love with another without any specific reason and on the spot. If love is irrational, then it would be difficult to see how it can be structured ethically and even how ethical considerations could make demands on it. My love for you might make do crazy things, such as dance naked in the street, spend more money than I can possibly afford, and neglect to write good philosophy papers. But it might also make me lie to others on your behalf, break off relations with my family for your sake, hide you from the law even though I know you to be a criminal, and perhaps even beat you upall because I love you. In Raymond Carvers, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, a story thematically and structurally similar to Platos Symposium, two couples sit around a kitchen table drinking and discussing love. Terri tells the others about her ex-boyfriend, Ed, who loved her so much he tried to kill her: He beat me up one night. He dragged me around the living room by my ankles. He kept saying, I love you, I love you, you bitch. He went on

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After Mel, her current boyfriend, says that this is not love because the kind of love he is talking about does not make the lover go about trying to kill his beloved, Terri insists that Ed did love her and that she knows that he loved her. To Terri, people are different and they show their love in their own ways. The immunity claim can be rendered in substantively different ways. Consider two of these. As the example of lying to others for the sake of my lover indicates, the immunity claim can be stated as saying that when it comes to ethical demands external to the love relationship, the needs of the relationship, whether ethical or otherwise, have priority. This leaves room for ethical considerations to structure the relationship itself. The Carver example brings out another way of stating the immunity claim: even within a love relationship, love can manifest itself in unethical ways, ways that are justified precisely because they are manifestations of love. Beating my lover to a pulp is permissible because I beat him out of love. It is the second way of stating the immunity claim that I wish to consider in the rest of the paper. I will first flesh it out, then raise an objection to it, and finally reply to the objection. What is it for love to be virtuous? First, if love is inherently structured by virtue, the concept of love would be morally normative. This means that when in love, we value our beloved. This valuation is not only aesthetic valuing the physical appearance of my lover, for example; nor is it only practicalvaluing the fact that my lover makes my life easier in many respects; it is also moral: I value the ways in which my beloved treats me and tends to my well-being, and I value my beloved and attend to his well-being. When the valuation is reciprocal, there exists a morally structured love relationship: each lover values the other in many ways, but also does so morally, and their moral valuation is essential to their love. Why essential? Consider the following thought experiments. Imagine a case of love in which one of the two partners does not care at all about the other. Or imagine a case in which one of the partners has no respect for the other. Or a case in which one is systematically dishonest with the other. Or in which one is systematically unfair to the other. Our reaction (I hope) to such cases is that they are all a sham. No situation can be of love if one partner is always cruel to the other. The Carver story puzzles us because we do not have all the information. Did Ed beat up Terri all the time? If yes, then surely it is not love, and Terris testimony to the contrary would not be taken seriously. Indeed, we might think her psychologically weak in some sense. The above cases are extreme and rare, but they tell us something important: without minimal virtues to operate in love, there would be no love. Why virtues? And what are they, anyway? If we consider how people live, think, and talk about their love relationships, the language of the virtues

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is paramount. People often leave their spouses because the spouses are uncaring, dishonest, unfair, disrespectful, and even because they are stupid and cowards. Talk of the virtues also allows us tremendous flexibility. For if different love relationships are structured by different ideals and cultural norms, then, given the variety of virtues, more elbow room exists in love. When we talk about love and ethics, then, the virtues would have to be part of the story. So this answers the first question. I do not have a closed list of the virtues, and it might not be a good idea to have one, since we might discover new virtues in the future. But there are salient virtues: care, respect, wisdom, fairness, courage, fidelity, honesty, and gratitude. I borrow this list from Mike Martins book, Loves Virtues (1996), a book devoted to this topic, and one to which I will return. Martin does not think that this list exhaustive, and we can add some virtues to it, such as patience, sensitivity, self-knowledge, and knowledge of the spouse (and people in general). Consider honesty and self-knowledge as examples of how two virtues structure love. I will use James Baldwins Giovannis Room (1956) to contextualize and enliven the examples. The narrator of the novel, David, is a homosexual man who cannot acknowledge this fact about himself. While in Paris, he meets Giovanni, an Italian man working as a bartender. They soon hit it off and David moves into Giovannis room. For a while they seem happy, but David soon begins to find the room stifling and implying a commitment he is not ready to make. On one of the walls of the room was wallpaper that depicts a heterosexual couple on a walk, and despite Giovannis attempts at remodeling the room, this particular wallpaper never came down, reminding David of the norm of heterosexuality. One day, while taking a walk together, eating cherries, and playfully spitting the pits at each other, David notices a good-looking guy, and he immediately invests him with Giovannis beauty. Giovanni notices this and laughs. The laughter makes David realize that his affair with Giovanni has awakened within him a beast . . . which would never go to sleep again (ibid., pp. 110111): Would he grow up to chase men in dark alleyways like all the others do? The beast, of course, is that of homosexuality, Davids view of which is not in the least bit flattering. Crucial is Davids refusal to think of himself as a homosexual, and his insistence that he is someone who has only the potential for homosexuality. This fear of being homosexual drives David to have sex with Sue, a woman whom he fleetingly knows. He does not find her attractive, but he knows that he needs to prove to himself that he is not homosexual. He uses Sue to do this. His brief encounter with her also characterizes well his longer relationship with Hella Lincoln, another American woman he meets in Paris, but who had been away in Spain at the time he and Giovanni were having an affair. Knowing that Hella will soon be returning to Paris, David decides to cut off all relations with Giovanni and to settle down with her. At his insistence,

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he and Hella leave Paris and go to the south of France. But David soon begins to find Hella stale and to wish that her body were harder and firmer. He leaves her in search for more satisfying sexual encounters. After several days of looking for him, she finds David in a bar with some sailor. What I wish to claim is that David lacked the needed self-knowledge that would allow him to lead a healthy love relationship. Assuming that he was, indeed, homosexual, it would be impossible for David to have a healthy love relationship with a woman, as evinced by the fiasco with Hella. Knowing that he was homosexual would allow him to have one needed trait for his relationship with Giovanni to succeed. While David did not accept himself as gay, this lack of self-acceptance is mainly due to his lack of knowledge that he is gay. Self-knowledge works in tandem with other virtues, such as selfacceptance, courage, and wisdom. This is not to say that having one virtue entails having the rest, but that sometimes having one virtue is not sufficient to do all the needed work. Hence, in his case not only does David need selfknowledge, but also self-acceptance, courage, wisdom, and honesty, to name a few, so as to allow his love for Giovanni to grow and to treat Hella with the respect and honesty she deserves and desires. Honesty is not ruthless truthtelling, but one requiring knowledge of when, under what circumstances, and to whom to tell the truth. David fails miserably in this respect, since he led Hella on, making her think he loved her, and he led Giovanni on, making him think he loved him. Self-knowledge as a virtue, and in conjunction with other virtues, disposes one to behave in morally commendable ways. For example, knowing that I will make a fool of myself if I drink, I will avoid drinking, at least on those occasions during which I would not want my behavior to embarrass my beloved. More important, knowing that I am a sexually active person I would not be disposed to enter a sexually monogamous relationship. Lacking self-knowledge, I might get myself in trouble; this is precisely what happens to David. Self-knowledge is, of course, a tough concept. How much selfknowledge is required? How much of it is relevant to love? How deep should the knowledge be? Can I have self-knowledge all by myself? Or do I need the help of others, including trained professionals? And am I always responsible for not having the relevant forms or depth of self-knowledge? These difficult questions might not have clear and universally true answers. We do have, though, some paradigm cases. For example, not all items of self-knowledge, say, being a lover of chocolate cereal, are relevant to love. And because of factors outside my control, I might not have easy access to who I am, for which a series of revelations might be needed. I might also not always be responsible for being ignorant about some things about myself. Consider David again. His inability to easily know who he is, is at least partly due to his internalization of heterosexual norms, which has done much to block introspection on his part, and for which he is not responsible. I do not wake up one morning and simply decide on which norms to internalize.

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The humble point of this discussion is to give an example of how some virtues are crucial to love relationships and how their absence leads to difficulties in initiating and maintaining such relationships. This point is part of the larger one that the virtues enter into and structure love relationships. But now we encounter a crucial objection. If love is structured by the virtues, what about all those cases in which a not-so-virtuous person loves another? What do we make of the idea, for example, of Ed loving Terri? And do we also not want to say that David loved Giovanni? But on my account, he lacked some virtues. How then are we to make sense of the claim that he loved him? This objection can also be raised in connection with Mike Martins classification in Loves Virtues of the word love into at least three different senses, the classifying sense, the preference sense, and the moral sense (1996, p. 12). The first sense is morally neutral because it only classifies emotional states and so distinguishes love from related attitudes. In the preference sense, we use love to express subjective tastes, which, in the case of love, would be erotic tastes. These tastes are as varied as other tastes that we have, and are activated in response to different features in the erotic object, such as dark hair, a particular type of butt shape, and a particular kind of sense humor. Since these are tastes, they need not have any ultimate justifications, and thus we might be tempted to think that love is morally neutral precisely because of this. Martin does not wish to reduce love to mere preferences, because his thesis is that love is ethically structured. Indeed, the third and moral sense of love embodies Martins claim. Love refers to a number of virtues, such as honesty, caring, and fairness, and is incompatible with systematic cruelty and deceit. This is the sense of love I have been emphasizing. The problem is that it is not clear how to connect the three senses of love to see what to make of the claim that love is ethically structured. Martin is silent on the possible connection between the three senses and on how it bears on his thesis. He does say that hidden in some accounts of the preference sense are some moral claims. But this does not entail that any account of preferencelove is based in moral terminology, and it does not tell us what the connection actually is. Perhaps we can say that Ed did not love Terri in the moral sense of love, but that he did in the preference and classification senses. Ed has an attitude or emotion that is not that of charity, or admiration, or of any other attitude closely related to love, but that of love. Or perhaps Ed did love Terri but only in the preference sense: Ed had an erotic taste for Terri, activated in him by certain features she possessed. This is a formally coherent solution to the objection, but it does not really get to the bottom of the issue. For why should our descriptive sense of love be at odds with the moral sense? What are we to make of the claim that Ed loved Terri descriptively but not morally? If the virtues that structure love are not part of Eds emotion for or attitude towards Terri, why should we

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describe it as love? After all, if the virtues do structure love, any adequate description of the emotion of love would include this. Perhaps this is the claim that Martin wants to make but that he does not clearly articulate, namely, that the descriptive and preference senses of love are not, and cannot be, adequate on their own, given their exclusion of moral aspects. If this is Martins claim, then it is true as far as it goes, but it also renders our problem better focused: How are we to make sense of the claim that Ed loved Terri under the moral sense of love? How can we, without relying on word-usage relativism, understand the claim that David loved Giovanni even though, on my interpretation of the novel, David lacked some necessary virtues? Let us put aside the case of Ed and Terri for the simple reason that the story does not supply enough needed information, especially about Ed and Terris relationship, for us to be able to discuss it in detail. We can imagine possible background information and address each possibility, but this is not necessary. The solution I would like to offer is not ingenious, and it does not rely on uncovering a subtle and overlooked philosophical distinction. It relies on the complexity of the phenomenon of love, of human beings, and of circumstances. We should not think of the claim that love is ethically structured in a rigid way. We should not understand it as meaning that love is made up of such-and-such virtues (here a list follows), and that, in a particular case, if one of these virtues is missing, love does not exist in that case. Given the complexity of our lives, we should understand the claim that the virtues structure love in a generous and flexible way. For instance, a person can love another even if a crucial virtue is mostly absent. Someone can love another even if he or she does not act on one or more virtues on every occasion that requires such action. Someone can love another even if, say due to psychological impediments, some virtues were entirely absent, as long as others were present, and as long as his or her mental energies are directed at his or her beloved. This sounds mysterious, and I will clarify it soon enough. For now, two points bear emphasis. First, love cannot exist if the virtues are entirely absent. Second, love cannot exist unless the lovers mental energies are directed at his or her beloved in an intentionally non-malicious way. We have the reasons for the first point, but why the second? It is meant to capture the idea without getting into too much metaphysical nonsensethat in love some measure of attention paid to one person exists. The attention is primarily mental, otherwise we encounter cases in which love clearly exists but in which the lover is unable to exhibit his or her love physically, due to geographical distance or some other obstacle. The mental energy is non-intentionally malicious because while someone cannot love another and intentionally desire to hurt the beloved, cases do exist in which the lover is unable to stop him or herself acting, or from omitting to act, in ways that lead to harming the beloved. The second point refers to a necessary condition for romantic love, not

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a sufficient one. A sexual or erotic component should be added to it so that it could apply to romantic cases of love. David did love Giovanni, despite the fact that he lacked some virtues. While his care did not extend far enough, and while he lacked the courage and self-knowledge needed for his affair with Giovanni to bloom, these considerations do not render false the claim that David loved Giovanni. First, his mental energies were directed at Giovanni in a non-malicious way. Second, there were times when David did show Giovanni his care, respect, honesty, and gratitude. Such considerations support the idea that he loved him, and so they supply us with one example of how someone can love another even if some virtues are absent due to impediments, which, in Davids case, are societal norms that made it difficult for him to clearly think about who he is and how he should relate to others. His internalization of equating manhood with heterosexuality prevented him from being courageous when he needed to be, and his persistent need to affirm his manliness got in the way of his ability to be honest. We are moved to pity, instead of loathing, David, because we understand that he is not responsible for these psychological impediments, despite the enormity of harm that his actions led to in Hella and Giovannis lives. (It is perhaps because of this that many gay and lesbian relationships fail in a homophobic world.) Note that many of the virtues that serve to ethically structure love are self-oriented. Imagine a case in which a lover, x, attends so much to the beloved y, that he or she is a doormat. There is something wrong here. Granted that x has no dignity, does this preclude him or her from being in love? Perhaps not. But adding a few self-regarding virtues, such as self-respect and integrity, to our list of virtues needed for love, would accommodate those intuitions that the case of x and y is not that of love. More important, even those who do consider to it be one of love would agree that it is not a case of proper love or of love fully, precisely because x lacks self-respect. For if x and y are in love, how can y love someone with no self-respect or dignity? How would it differ from loving an object? But if x has a status similar to that of an object, how can he or she love back, or, at least, fully do so? If the virtues are crucial to love, how are we to account for unrequited love? Would such a love not exist? Not quite. First, virtues are dispositional traits: a virtuous person behaves virtuously in the right circumstances. So xs unrequited love for y can still be love, since, were y to reciprocate his or her love, the love between them would be ethically structured. Second, looking into the mind of a lover we do not find only sexual fantasies that take the beloved as their object, but a variety of fantasies that refer to potential behavior towards the beloved, were the beloved to reciprocate the love. The unrequited lover imagines him or herself caring for y, defending y, and attending to ys wishes. Of course, such fantasies might be, and probably would be, exaggerated, but the point is that they do include virtuous behavior. Unrequited love

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is not nonvirtuous love or nonexistent; it is, at worst, an incomplete, severely confined love. To summarize, sometimes x loves y in minimal ways, and sometimes in substantial ways. That love is ethically structured does not mean that it is always and to the fullest degree be ethically saturated. Love comes in degrees, and while this might be a platitude, it would be good to support it philosophically. Moreover, we are not always responsible for the degrees in which love comes; luck plays a big role. As Just Be Good to Me (1983), sung by the SOS Band goes, Life is a game of chances, but Ill take my chance with you. (A different version of this paper was presented to the members of the philosophy department, University of Illinois, Chicago. Thanks to them for their excellent questions and suggestions, and to Steve Jones for helpful comments.) Works Cited
Baldwin, James. (1956) Giovannis Room. New York: Dell Publishing. Carver, Raymond. (1989) What We Talk About When We Talk about Love. New York: Vintage Books. Just Be Good to Me (1983) Cassette single. Written and produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Martin, Mike. (1996) Loves Virtues. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

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