Moral Challenges in Loving the Unlovable

Love can be horrible: it can alienate us from others, distort our basic capacities for human connection, turn us into morally worse people. This dissertation is about the morally dark side of love. Chapter One is about how love itself can alienate lovers from one another. This occurs in everyday life when people receive love in ways they don’t think is deserved. A self-loathing brother might, for example, find the affectionate love of a sister alienating. This poses a challenge to all views of love that claim love is rationally justifiable. Whatever is taken to do the rationalizing work, such views allow for a mismatch between love received and love thought deserved. This can lead to alienation between lovers. Chapter Two is about incels. These are young men whose basic capacities for human connection have been distorted by their pain at not receiving the kind of love they think they deserve. How incels seem to simultaneously desire and detest women has been a puzzle for healthcare professionals, law enforcement agents, and philosophers. This chapter offers a novel explanation that appeals to aesthetic insecurity. The pain incels experience from perceived romantic rejection is made worse by the specific features of their insecurity, resulting in behavior that suggests simultaneous desire and detest. Chapter Three offers a novel view of personal relationships. The view sets out four types of regards (logistic, sexual, intimacy, alluring) and shows how their different combinations can define most personal relationships today. This has two major upshots. The first is that it gives our concepts and language an efficient way to define, differentiate, and keep up with all the various non-traditional relationships today. The second is that it gives us a way to understand the ethical commitments that arise from personal relationships. At its best, the view can help us navigate our everyday personal relationships. The hope is that it can also help us avoid the darkness of love gone awry.

Author dc:creator

• Yoon, Youngbin

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Singer, Daniel
• Lord, Errol

• Philosophy

Language dc:language.iso

en

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/60880

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.upenn.edu:20.500.14332/60880