Sick Love?

Welcome readers! This is my new blog devoted to the unconscious and irrational elements of love. If you are more technically inclined and love philosophy and psychology, you might want to visit my blog Lemmings. If love is your passion, stay put.

My view on love? You can love another person for just about any reason. Sounds strange? It’s not. You can kill for just about any reason, though very few are good reasons. Coral Eugene Watts strangled several women because he saw evil in their eyes. Belle Sorenson Gunness slaughtered her husbands because she believed men were evil. Ed Gein mutilated, skinned and gutted his graveyard goodies and his only live victim because he wanted to be a woman and believed he needed body parts for a sex change (or maybe to make a replica of his mother). None of these reasons are good reasons to kill, and not all reasons are good reasons to love. Still true love can, in principle, be love for any reason.

This idea that true love can occur for any reason is at odds with the view that true love is love for a good reason. In his acclaimed article "Love as a Moral Emotion” NYU professor J. David Velleman writes: "Being loved does not entail being valued on the basis of our distinctive qualities, such as our yellow hair; on the contrary, it entails being valued on the basis of our personhood, in which we are no different from other persons" (1999: 366).

In my humble opinion, our loved ones must possess particular physical attributes or personality traits in order for our love to be rational but they need not possess any particular physical attributes or personality traits in order for love to be true love. Or to put the point differently: Not all love is rational but rationality is no more of a constraint on love than rationality is a constraint on action.

Love is an emotion. Emotions can be rational. Your fear of Ted Bundy whispering in your ear that he is going to continue to have intercourse with your corpse until it putrefies is rational. So is your anger at the two 10-year old British boys who kidnapped 2-year old James Bulger and took him on a 5 kilometer walk, only to throw blue paint in his eyes, kick him and hit him with bricks, stones and a 10 kg iron bar, molest his tiny penis, place batteries in his mouth and anus and leave him on train tracks where he died before his corpse was cut in pieces by a goods train.

Like actions and beliefs emotions can be irrational. Ethan’s fear of flying is irrational because he knows that flying is safer than walking from the pool table to the restroom at the local pub in Detroit. Your anger when you first met John and he said, “Awright me old fruit, what gender are ye?”, is irrational because you know that half the people you meet are below average, that John is too stupid to be a smart-ass, and that his remark was meant as good-spirited humor. Anger in this circumstance is like borrowing cash from a pessimist because you believe that they won’t expect it back.