Love, value and supervenience

International Journal of Philosophical Studies

Volumn 16, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 495-508

  Rønnow Rasmussen, Toni ^a  

^a LUND UNIVERSITY   (Sweden)

Author keywords

Intentional content; Love; Subjectivism; Supervenience; Universalizability; Value for

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249616680     PISSN: 09672559     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09672550802335838     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. For a discussion of the major advocates of this sort of buck-passing analysis, see Wlodek Rabinowicz and Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen, 'The Strike of the Demon: On Fitting Pro-attitudes and Value', Ethics, 114 (2004), pp. 391-423.
2. The notion of love is a highly complex one. For instance, is it, as different authors have argued, an apprehension of something in the beloved, or an emotional response or perhaps a volitional state that has the beloved as its object? The latter suggestion is Harry Frankfurt's, and the view outlined here shows in several respects affinity with his understanding of love - notably what he calls 'active love'. See Harry J. Frankfurt, 'Autonomy, Necessity, and Love', in his Necessity, Volition, and Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
3. See also his description of love in 'On Caring', in the same work, p. 165. However, since the problems of linking love and value mainly come from a certain aspect of love, I confine my discussion to this feature.
4. Blaise Pascal, Pensées and Other Writings, trans. Honor Levi, World's Classics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 130-1 (567).
5. For a critical survey of different positions about love, see Christopher Grau, 'The Irreplaceability of Persons', Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 2002. It drew my attention, among many other things, to the fact that we owe Pascal at least the view that it is the qualities we love, not the person.
6. Later on, in section 6, I will outline in more detail what I take value supervenience to be about. However, in this paper the precise nature of the relation between the supervenient and the subjacent features is deliberately left open. I have discussed supervenience in more detail in 'Dislodging Butterflies from the Supervenient', in Stephen Voss (ed.) Philosophical Anthropology, Vol. 9, Proceedings of the 2003 Istanbul World Congress (2007).
7. The idea that properties may play different roles in attitudes goes back to the 'dual-role' view of right reasons discussed in Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen, 'The Strike of the Demon', p. 414.
8. Cf. Robert C. Roberts' point in Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
9. that 'love, in the dispositional sense of attachment . is a construal that identifies the object of concern'. Emotions, on the other hand, 'are situational construals of the object of concern' (p. 288).
10. This observation is made by some authors. See, for instance, Frankfurt, 'Autonomy, Necessity, and Love'.
11. An example would be a person who has a certain preference for, say, a particular sexual activity, but who realizes that there are good reasons for him not to have and act on this attitude. See Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson, 'The Significance of Recalcitrant Emotions (or Anti-Quasi-judgementalism)', in Anthony Hatzimoysis (ed.) Philosophy and the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): 'We will say that an emotion is recalcitrant when it exists despite the agent's making a judgement that is in tension with it' (p. 129).
12. G. E. Moore is perhaps the most prominent example of someone who argued that we should not expand our value typology with 'good-for'. In 'Analysing Personal Value', Journal of Ethics, 11 (2007), pp. 405-35, I argue that his argument is in fact not very convincing. But I also suggest a novel interpretation of good-for that ought to make this notion acceptable to those who share Moore's scepticism regarding agent-relative goodness.
13. See also Connie Rosati, 'Objectivism and Relational Good', Social Philosophy and Politics, 25 (1) (2007), pp. 314-49, who questions Donald Regan's recent suggestion that we should replace good-for with 'good occurring in a life'.
14. See Rønnow-Rasmussen, 'Dislodging Butterflies'.
15. See J. Kim, Supervenience and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). The strong version captures something essential about value supervenience. However, it seems to leave out one aspect, namely what we might call the 'direction-feature' of the 'because of' relation. This relation suggests that moral properties and natural ones are connected in a special sense - the latter ones give rise to (or support) the former, and not vice versa. But consider now the relation between 'x being coloured' and 'x being extended'; this relation is not, in my view, an example of a 'because of or 'in virtue of relation. But suppose we reformulated the strong thesis in terms of 'colour- and extension-properties'; in that case the strong supervenience thesis does seem to fit the relation that exists between 'colour and extension'. In other words, if we do not want to say that colour and extension exemplify the same relation that is found between moral properties and natural ones, we need to qualify the strong supervenience thesis in some way.
16. I discuss such problems in 'Subjectivism and Objectivism: An Outline', in W. Rabinowicz and T. Rønnow-Rasmussen (eds) Patterns of Value: Essays on Formal Axiology and Value Analysis, Lund Philosophy Reports (Lund, 2003).
17. Perhaps a more correct way of putting it would be to say that supervenience is a relation between instantiated properties, and not merely properties. See, e.g., Jonas Olson, 'A Question about Supervenience and Value-making Properties', in Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen, Patterns of Value, p. 132.
18. As a curiosity, it may be pointed out that R. M. Hare, who is often said to have introduced the term to moral philosophers, did in fact describe the supervenience relation in a way that permitted it to have relata belonging to quite different ontological entities. See R. M. Hare, 'Supervenience', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. 58 (1984).
19. Reprinted in Hare, Essays in Ethical Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).