Fitting Love and Reasons for Loving

Abstract

The “quality view” claims that what makes love fitting are the lovable qualities of the beloved. Although natural, this view seems to face a battery of embarrassing difficulties. It predicts, for example, that if someone is more lovable than your beloved, then it’s fitting for you to love that person more than, or instead of, your beloved (the problem of trading up); and that if your beloved loses his lovable qualities, it would no longer be fitting to love him (the problem of inconstancy). Chapter 6 offers a new defense of the quality view. It argues that, by supplementing the view with a plausible pluralism about normative reasons for love, quality theorists can easily answer all of the problems that putatively plague them.