This paper begins by bringing love and hate into tension via the ideal that you ought to love your enemy. The trouble with loving your enemy is that they may seem to merit hate instead, especially in cases of serious injustice. I develop this simple thought into a challenge for loving your enemy: that you cannot be required to do what makes no sense to you. This challenge is not adequately met by extant explanations for why you ought to love your enemy within the Christian tradition and its heirs, which tend to give reasons that are either insufficient or else instrumentalize love. The second half of the paper presents a solution with a very different shape to the challenge. I argue that love may still be fitting even when your enemy fails to merit love, notwithstanding the contemporary orthodoxy about fittingness. What makes it fitting to love your enemy depends on the fact (if it is one) that you yourself have received unmerited love. You may thereby have reason to exclude the issue of merit from consideration; what is more, you have reason to love out of gratitude for the unmerited love that you yourself received.
Surprisingly often, offenders suffer amnesia regarding crimes they have committed. Should punishment be abated in such cases? Philosophers have largely overlooked this question. Extant views cluster around a straightforward answer: deserving punishment depends on remembering one’s crime. However, arguments for that view rely on implausible assumptions about personal identity or the justification of punishment. Additionally, that view implies that offenders could manipulate how much punishment they deserve. Instead, uneasiness about punishing amnesiacs can be traced back to distinctive reasons to show mercy. In particular, amnesiacs are typically unable to access their motives for the crimes they committed. As a result, they face the peculiar hardship of not fully comprehending their own role in bringing punishment upon themselves. Furthermore, they cannot make up their minds how to feel about their past decisions nor situate those decisions within a satisfying narrative arc of their lives.
Consequentialist theories that directly assess multiple focal points face an important objection: that one right option may conflict with another. Robert Adams raises an instance of this objection regarding the possibility that the right act conflicts with the right motives. Whereas only partial responses have previously been given, assuming particular views of the relation between motives and acts, an exhaustive treatment is in order. Either motives psychologically determine acts, or they do not—and I defend direct consequentialism on each assumption. Crucially, if motives determine acts, this may be compatible with the ability to act otherwise, but there remains a defense for consequentialism even on these assumptions. What clears consequentialism of conflict is not necessarily that the apparently right act is unavailable, but rather that its outcome is suboptimal once we account for necessary motives. Even if the agent remains free to perform the act, the act costs too much.
I motivate a form of dualism that has gone unappreciated in moral theory. One fundamental standard of rightness assesses acts according to their motives, while the other assesses acts according to their outcomes. For example, when a parent takes on an unnecessarily large risk out of sacrificial love for their child, the risk-taking is both right and wrong; when a friend tells an important truth out of spite, the truth-telling is both wrong and right. Each of these two standards of rightness has distinguished contemporary defenders who, recognizing the powerful attraction of the other standard, attempt to address its significance from within their own views. These include shallower forms of pluralism—pluralisms regarding focal points, values, pro tanto duties, targets of virtue, and other moral concepts—as attempts to supplement a single standard of rightness. I argue that none of these approaches is adequate. We should instead embrace the deeper and more radical dualism of two separate and equally fundamental standards of rightness: being for and bringing about. (draft)
AI-powered digital assistants are increasingly capable of alerting users to socially relevant information in real time. Since such information bears on what would be virtuous in the situation, can digital assistants help users to act virtuously? This article engages that question within an Aristotelian framework and complicates it in light of the extended mind thesis. According to Aristotle’s canonical account, anyone who performs the virtuous action counts as acting in accord with virtue, but only those who do it with the right kind of settled knowledge and motivation can be said to act from virtue. I argue that while digital assistants plausibly extend one’s cognitive states, the same cannot be said regarding conative states. Digital assistants, therefore, cannot help to constitute acting from virtue. At most, digital assistants can enable acting in accord with virtue and—perhaps—help habituate virtuous action. (draft)
One of the most obvious occasions for loneliness arises when your love goes unreciprocated. We might call extreme cases “heartbreak” when you have your heart set on a person who does not feel the same way about you. First, I explain the nature of loneliness and why unreciprocated love is neither necessary nor sufficient for it. Then, I consider two different kinds of heartbreak that are often conflated in philosophy in order to distinguish the nature of loneliness characteristic of each. While pure unrequited love brings loneliness with respect to your beloved, breakups in the wake of serious relationships bring loneliness with respect to yourself.
Selflessness is widely regarded as a moral ideal. The person who puts a family member or friend before themselves, even when their own interests are as great or greater, merits our admiration and aspiration to do the same. Partiality in appropriate forms is a moral ideal, too. Although this is not exceptionless, prioritizing those who are near and dear is fitting in many situations—again, even when there are others who stand to gain more or lose more. My aim is, first, to juxtapose partiality with selflessness in order to bring into view a tension between them that existing approaches to partiality struggle to balance. Second, I aim to offer a unified vindication of these intuitive ideals at the level of the moral quality of one’s motives by proposing a new way of understanding the epistemic condition on quality of will. (draft)
Many religious traditions attribute to God a merciful, gracious, loving stance toward humanity. I home in on God’s reasons for showing mercy in particular. My discussion aims to illuminate points of contact between divine mercy and mercy within human legal institutions as characterized by contemporary moral and political philosophy. Eschewing appeals to repentance (another common ground for mercy), I present a two-pronged approach to justifying God’s mercy on the basis of God’s role as storyteller and of humanity’s having already suffered “poetic justice.” (draft)
Motive Fatalism is a common assumption in moral psychology: that agents lack direct control over their motives. I argue that Motive Fatalism fails to earn its keep. Control over motives is deeply implicated in control over action. If Motive Fatalism were true, agents could not perform many acts that are intuitively available to perform, including morally important acts. One strategy for avoiding this conclusion appeals to purely moral motivation; another appeals to compatibilist accounts of ability to act otherwise. Crucially, however, those strategies succeed only if Motive Fatalism is false in the first place. The solution must be that agents do have direct control over motives. This solution finds promise in existing accounts of control—including control as reasons-responsiveness, and control as question-settling—which until now have been limited to actions and other attitudes like beliefs and intentions. (draft)
Two important debates in the moral psychology of love center around the reasons for love and the reasons of love. The first issue concerns the grounds of love: some say that love is based on attractive properties intrinsic to the beloved; others, that love is based on the relationship with the beloved. The second issue concerns what love aims at: here, some say that the lover desires union with the beloved; others, that the lover aims at the good of the beloved. But it is interesting to note that each of those views finds a natural home in either eros or philia. And unlike the competition between those views in the contemporary literature, the classical forms of love tend to be seen as equally legitimate. In this more inclusive spirit, I propose an account of love that unites the various views corresponding to the reasons for and reasons of love. (draft)
Work on the axiology of theism typically discusses God’s value in terms of the discrete values and disvalues contributed by God’s existence. In contrast, I motivate a novel approach to the question of God’s value along the lines of a fitting-response theory of value. However, the modes of value that are familiar from fitting response theories do not seem to do justice to the depth of that question. In order more fully to understand the ways in which God’s value is distinctive, we must look to certain responses that are uniquely fitting towards God—my discussion focuses on awe and prayer. Because such responses are neither positively nor negatively valenced, however, I argue that we should loosen our grip on a valenced notion of value and instead think more broadly about how God matters. (draft)