Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Universal beneficence and love

Take as true this plausible thesis:

  1. If you love someone, you have moral reason to benefit that person.
This is curious: it means that if I brainwash you into loving me, you will have moral reason to benefit me. But surely you did not gain a moral reason to benefit me from my brainwashing you. So you must have already had that moral reason before I brainwashed you into loving me. Hence you always already had a moral reason to benefit me, and since I'm not special in this respect, you always already had a moral reason to benefit everyone.

Here's another thesis:

  1. You should never try to stop loving.
But again suppose I brainwash you into loving me. If loving me was something optional, something you had no duty to, then it should be permissible for you to undo my imposition of love. But by (2) it's not permissible. So although I did wrong in forcing you to love me, loving me is indeed the right thing for you to do--it is your duty. But I'm not special. So you always already had a moral reason to love everyone.

But it is not in general wrong to try to stop having a particular form of love. We can find ourselves with the wrong form of love: we can love grown children as small children, for instance, or having a romantic love towards someone we ought not. In those cases, it is right to try to stop having that particular form of love, trying as much as one can to replace it with the right form.

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