Philosophy of Love, Sex, and Marriage

An Introduction

Raja Halwani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138280205
• eBook ISBN: 9781351987899
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

How is love different from lust or infatuation? Do love and marriage really go together "like a horse and carriage"? Does sex have any necessary connection to either? And how important are love, sex, and marriage to a well-lived life? In the Second Edition of this lively, lucid, and comprehensive book, Raja Halwani explores and elucidates the nature, uses, and ethics of romantic love, sexuality, and marriage. It is structured in three parts:

• Love examines the nature of romantic love and how it differs from other types of love, such as friendship and parental love. It also investigates the relationship of love to morality and asks what limits morality puts on romantic love and even whether romantic love is inherently moral.
• Sex demonstrates the difficulty in defining sex and the sexual, and examines what constitutes good and bad sex in terms of pleasure, "naturalness," and moral permissibility. It discusses the nature of sexual desire and its connection to objectification and virtue, all the while looking at specific sexual engagements such as pornography, BDSM, and raced desires.
• Marriage traces the history of the institution and describes the various forms in which marriage exists and the reasons why people marry. It also investigates the necessity of marriage and ways in which it requires reform.

Updates and Revisions in the Second Edition

• Expands the coverage of love and morality from one to two chapters, incorporating much of the recent literature on love as a moral emotion.
• Includes a new chapter on sex and virtue ethics.
• Ends each of the chapters on sex with an "applied" topic, such as pornography, BDSM, prostitution, racial sexual desires, and adultery.
• Increases coverage of the nature and purpose of marriage, including debates surrounding same-sex marriage, but also moving beyond these debates to include issues on minimal marriage, temporary marriage, polygamy, and other forms of marriage.
• Updates the Further Reading and Study Questions sections at the end of each chapter and provides an up-to-date comprehensive bibliography at the back of the book.
• Includes new discussions of topics on the nature of love; love and reasons; distinctions between two types of romantic love; love and its connections to moral theories; definitions of crucial sexual concepts; objectification; virtue and sex; racial sexual desires; and the definition of marriage and whether it is important as an institution.

Part I
Love

1
What Is Romantic Love?

Outline of the Chapter

In this chapter, I explain and evaluate a few theories about the nature of romantic love. I then distinguish between two forms or types of romantic love, a distinction that we need for much of the discussion of this part of the book. After making the distinction, we take a short detour to discuss the differences, if any, between love and infatuation. Finally, I explain and solve an important puzzle about romantic love and value, encapsulated in the question, “Do we love someone because they are valuable or are they valuable because we love them?”

Preliminaries

Love is a phenomenon that is ever-present and universal to human beings (and probably to many non-human animals). It can take on different types of objects, that is, human beings can love other human beings, animals, non-living objects, including ideas and abstract things, activities, and sensations. One can love one’s friends, one’s children, animals (including one’s pets), one’s country, one’s collection of superhero comic books, art, the elegance of proofs, playing football, and the pleasures of eating a delicious veggie burger. Moreover, the love of other human beings has different types: philosophers distinguish among the love we have for our significant others, be they boyfriends or girlfriends, long-term partners, or spouses; the love we have for friends; the love for siblings and close family members; the love for children; the love for parents; the love for colleagues and acquaintances; and the love for humanity at large. The focus of this part of the book is only on romantic love, and I will refer to other types of interhuman love only in the service of better addressing issues concerning romantic love.

The question we need to now address is, “What is romantic love?” This question is ambiguous. For instance, it could be a question about the definition of the concept of “romantic love,” which would provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of the concept. It could be a question about the essence of the phenomenon of romantic love—whether romantic love has certain essential properties without which it would not be romantic love (it is not a problem whether these properties are shared by other types of love). It could be a question about the list of the general characteristics or features that romantic love has. It could be a question about the type of thing that is romantic love—whether it is a desire, an emotion, an attitude, or some other thing altogether. It could also be asking about the underlying mechanisms of romantic love—whether it is primarily a brain or neurological state, a psychological one, or a purely social phenomenon (a “socially constructed state,” to use an academically popular term).

Although the question, “What is romantic love?” could seek an answer to one or more of the above questions (there might be more), and although we can agree that the above questions are legitimate variations of “What is romantic love?,” philosophers might disagree about the connections between them.¹ Some, for example, might argue that the question about the essence of love is the same as the question about what type of entity romantic love is (that is, to ask whether romantic love is, say, an emotion or a desire is to ask about its essence). Others might claim that to ask about the essence of love is to ask about its underlying mechanisms. These disputes will arise because there is no consensus among philosophers about how to understand romantic love (or the connections between the above concepts—essences, definitions, etc.); it is a question that is not widely addressed by philosophers and, when it has been broached, has not been looked at from all these angles.

We are not going to concern ourselves with the connections between these questions (but see Jenkins 2015b for some help), and we are not going to answer the one about defining “romantic love” for the reasons that, first, any such definition is bound to face counterexamples (as we will see below in discussing the characteristics of love), and, second, that we don’t need a definition to understand romantic love in the ways necessary to understand it. Listing its crucial features (a question that I will address) and investigating whether any of them are essential to love is enough for this purpose, and so is addressing the question of what type of thing it is—romantic love’s nature, so to speak.

Moreover, I will shortly distinguish between two forms of romantic love, the passionate or sexual form and the settled or companionate form. Although many philosophers note this crucial distinction when explaining the different types of love, they soon abandon it and discuss romantic love as a unitary phenomenon. However, not maintaining the distinction between these two forms of romantic love can lead, and has led, to the many entanglements we see in philosophical discussions about love, such as whether it is involuntary, whether it is responsive to reasons, and whether it is a selfish emotion. We will then need this distinction.

Let us start with the question as to what type of thing romantic love is.

What Is the Nature of Romantic Love?

A common answer to this question is that romantic love is an emotion. Yet some philosophers have denied this and have given different accounts of love’s nature. In this section, we will look at some of these accounts, starting with the one that identifies, or strongly connects, romantic love with brain activity.

Science

It has become recently fashionable to discuss romantic love in terms of chemical and neurological processes to try to understand what happens to us when we are in love. Basically, the idea is that when we fall in love, the brain signals to some glands to produce hormones (such as adrenaline and cortisol) that can make the experience of being in love a mixture of anxiety, excitement, and pleasure.² The experience, especially of pleasure, makes it rewarding to be in love. Our brain is thus an enabler of love of sorts—it enables love by pumping hormones into our blood that make us want to continue to be in love. One interesting angle to this chemical aspect of love is possible medical intervention to, say, pharmaceutically either enhance or block the experience of love, and the moral questions this possibility raises. If one, for example, finds being in love to be oppressive, one might have recourse to drugs that would block the release of certain hormones, thereby helping one discontinue the love (or even preemptively help one not fall in love to begin with, like an immunization shot against it). Or, if one is finding it hard to keep one’s promises to “love and to hold forever,” one can take drugs to enhance one’s love in order to keep one’s promises.³

As fascinating as this discussion is, I would like to set it aside for a few reasons. First, even if love is a chemical process of sorts, this does not exhaust all the scientific questions about it, questions that are more important in their own ways than the chemistry of love. As the philosopher Ronald de Sousa puts it, “[O]ther perspectives are needed to explain why these mechanisms exist in the first place and what role they play in our lives. That calls for evolutionary theory, anthropology, psychology, sociology—none of which reduce to chemistry or physics” (2015, 78). Put slightly differently, chemical processes do not explain why nature has “designed” us in such a way so as to love; for that we need evolutionary biology and related fields. In addition, given that romantic love has always been clothed in different social and cultural mores, we need social scientific and cultural theories for a complete explanation of it.

In this regard, the philosopher Carrie Jenkins claims that romantic love has a dual nature: “it is ancient biological machinery embodying a modern social role” (2017, 82; emphases in the original). She uses the analogy of an actor playing a character to point to the relationship between love’s biology and love’s culture (2017, 82): for example, the actor Uma Thurman plays the role of The Bride in Kill Bill. When she has that wry smile on her face as she says to her enemies, “You and I have unfinished business,” that smile is both Thurman’s (biology, chemistry) and the Bride’s (culture). Thus, whether two gay women in the twenty-first century express their love publicly by holding hands or whether two gay women in the nineteenth century express theirs secretly by writing furtive love letters to each other, it is the same biology at work but expressed culturally differently.

It is instructive in this sense to think of other phenomena with a dual nature: most, if not all, of our emotions are probably rooted in some way in brain activity, yet are expressed, evaluated, and taken up differently depending on the culture and the time period. Ditto for sexual desire: it is a biological appetite, yet one that is always robed in cultural and social expressions and values. Ancient Roman men did not sexually desire women wearing stiletto heels simply because there were no such heels back then. How desires are felt, formed, and thought is deeply shaped by culture and social mores. Something similar surely happens with romantic love, though how to explain the connection between its biological aspect and its cultural one is the task that needs completion. So Jenkins is probably correct that romantic love has a dual nature, but the question is how to explicate this dual nature (I will return to her view shortly). Note that once we agree that romantic love is usually expressed in particular cultural formations, we must ever be on our guard on how inequalities in society seep into romantic love itself. For instance, because of gender inequality, the way men and women love might be different, even to this day.⁴

Now, because scientific investigators of romantic love are likely to agree with the claim that science does not provide a full explanation of love, we need to marshal other reasons as to why such scientific explanations are irrelevant. This takes us to the second reason for setting aside scientific explanations of love: given that all human (and mammalian) emotions are likely to be connected to some brain and chemical activity, and, given that some of these emotions might have a feel to them that is very similar to being in romantic love, science needs to better isolate whatever chemical and physical processes that are correlated with, cause, or are caused by being in love (Brogaard 2015, ch. 2). For example, if the prospect of seeing one’s beloved is exciting, anxiety-inducing, and pleasurable all at the same time, think of what the prospect of expressing your anger feels like; it, too, is exciting, pleasurable, and anxiety-inducing. Thus, to pin down romantic love’s chemistry we need a proper isolation method.

A third reason is that these scientific claims about love focus on people who are in love in its early passionate stages. Whether romantic love in its later, settled stages has such corresponding chemical actions and reactions remains to be seen. Although a study in 2012 involving the brain scans of 17 people who have been married (not to each other) for an average of 21 years showed that their brains exhibited activities similar to those activities exhibited by the brains of new lovers, more studies such as this are needed.⁵

A fourth, crucial reason for the irrelevancy of the scientific explanation of romantic love is that a proper understanding of romantic love might not require a scientific explanation at all. We can easily imagine, for example, an alien race whose chemical makeup is nowhere near our own, yet whose members seem to exhibit the same signs of love as we do: seeking each other out (as a pair or more), snuggling, taking care of each other, and so on. Upon discovering that their physical composition is not like ours, we are not likely to say, “They exhibit all the symptoms and behaviors we associate with human romantic love, but because their physical and chemical makeup is not like ours, they do not love.” Instead, we would agree that they love but that their love has a different chemical and physical correlation than our love does.

Indeed, we do not need to go to alien races to see this point. Suppose that your friend Melissa claims to have fallen in love with Sam and that she exhibits the range of all the usual symptoms and behaviors of human romantic love: lack of focus on things other than Sam, lack of appetite, impaired judgment, longing to be with Sam, giggling when with Sam, thinking that God broke the mold after creating Sam—the works. But suppose we discover that Melissa has none of the brain activity that scientists tell us are the neurological correlates of being in love. We would not change our minds about Melissa’s being in love. We would, I suspect, believe that Melissa’s love has different correlate activities in her brain.

Finally, a fifth reason is that even if we discover that love is connected to a certain type of brain or chemical activity, it is an open question how much this helps us understand love, as opposed to be able to control it, medicate it, and redirect it, for example. How would knowing that love is connected to a series of synapses firing an explanation of what love is, even a partial one? This is true of most psychological states: knowing that anger is connected to brain activity might leave us completely in the dark about what anger is.

For all these reasons, I will set aside the scientific discussion of love and move to other accounts of love’s nature.

Social Construction

In the previous section, I referred to Jenkins’s view that love is partly socially constructed. Explaining the relationship between the two sides of love—the social side and the non-social side—is important, especially for Jenkins’s view since she rejects the idea that society or culture shape how love is expressed. She claims, mysteriously, that this “downplays the importance of the social side of love … relegating it to mere expression” (2017, 81). The word “mere” is unfair to the concept of “expression,” since how things are expressed can be complicated and deep (as any quick look into the discussion of expression in the philosophy of art reveals). So what else is left for the social part to do other than (complexly) express love’s biology, if love is to have the dual nature of biology and society?

Jenkins calls the view that love has a dual nature (which she tentatively accepts) “constructionist functionalism” (2015b). The idea is that this view captures two things about love: its role and what makes someone play the role of love (“realizes” the role of love, as Jenkins puts it). In other words, when x loves y, love prompts x to do certain things with respect to y, such as courting y, feeling affection for y, valuing y, and marrying or committing in some form to y (Jenkins 2015b, 360). Now, some of those things that x is prompted to do are socially constructed: marrying y out of love, or courting y, are probably things that are specific to certain times and societies. Others are not socially constructed, such as feeling affection for y and valuing y. So far so good. However, we are left with the question: What makes x undergo or experience the things that x does towards y, whether socially constructed or not? To quote Jenkins: “What is it that prompts people to date, care, write heart-shaped letters, form new family units and marriage-like bonds, and so on?” (2015b, 361).

According to Jenkins, what realizes the love could be brain states, mental states, or “a drive best understood by studying our biology and/or evolutionary history, and so on” (2015b, 362). That is, we still need to fill in the part of, well, what love is (2015b, 361–2). If it is love that prompt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I Love
• PART II Sex
• PART III Marriage
• Concluding Remarks
• Bibliography
• Index