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May 27, 2005
Parental Love and Kantian Duties
In my last post, I argued that parental love is not really transparent according to Laurence Thomas' account of transparent love, though his more ultimate claim that transparency was supposed to give him is still correct. What got me initially looking into this is an excerpt he's posted from his forthcoming book The Family and the Political Self [Amazon link here for later on when it does have any informative content]. He gives transparent parental love as a counterexample to Kant's claim that your action X is morally significant only if you do X for the sake of duty rather than merely in accordance with duty. I disagree.
The argument is fairly straightforward, and much of it is familiar to anyone who knows of Michael Stocker's famous critique of Kant. The Stocker thesis is that Kant expects us to engage in every activity for the sake of mere duty, as if it's mere drudgery that we don't have any emotional or relational reason for doing. I shouldn't visit a friend in the hospital because I care for that friend. I should do it merely out of duty. When you put it that way, Kant sounds like an unfeeling jerk who thinks it's better to engage in mere action without the right sorts of motivation. I agreed with this critique until Bonnie Kent convinced me that the objection radically misunderstands Kant's claim. He isn't saying that we shouldn't go to the hospital to see loved ones because we love them but rather should do it out of duty robbed of emotional content. He's saying that doing so merely because of an emotional response is not acting in any morally commendable way. There's nothing morally special about going to the hospital when you want to be there anyway, because you want to be with your loved one. What's morally commendable is when you do it even in the cases when you aren't emotionally moved to do it. Kant isn't poo-pooing acting out of emotion. He's simply saying those aren't morally distinctive reasons. They may even be good actions, but they're not praiseworthy for moral reasons. Now Laurence comes in at this point in my reflections on Kant with this post taken from an excerpt of his forthcoming book manuscript. He argues for the Stocker point from the example of parental love. If I have parental love of the sort Laurence calls transparent (setting aside my criticism of that claim), then my love doesn't seem to be out of duty. It seems to be the sort of thing Kant wouldn't call a moral reason. Laurence then says that this deeply challenges Kantian morality, but I'm not sure how. Kant could say two things in response. First, he could say that this kind of love is simply not moral. That's not the sort of thing it is. This is in fact what Laurence seems to end up saying. He says morality is not person-specific but is rather impartial, whereas parental love is rightly person-specific. If Laurence is right, then this isn't a problem for Kant. Parental love of this sort is not moral, which is perfectly consistent with saying that it's not moral because it's not done for the sake of duty. It's not a counterexample to Kant's claim at all. It would need to be both moral and not done for the sake of duty to be a suitable counterexample. I think Laurence should agree with Bonnie Kent on this one. What's more is that Laurence has already said that parental love is rightly person-specific. This means that there is a moral reason for its being person-specific. So even though the parental love isn't itself the sort of thing Laurence calls moral, he wants to say that there are moral considerations that affect whether and how we should have this sort of love. This leads to the second claim I think Kant can make. He can say there's a moral reason for having this sort of parental love, and we should pursue that because it's the right thing to do. In normal moral development, we should seek to develop character traits that will lead us to have the kind of parental love Laurence says is transparent. I have questioned whether it's transparent, but there is indeed something that separates it from, e.g., romantic love. I would go so far as to say that we have a moral obligation to seek to develop the sort of character traits that will leave us psychologically positioned to love our children in such a way. This is something we ought to do for the sake of duty. Kant says that any action is morally good only if it's done for the sake of duty. What's morally good about loving one's children in the way Laurence calls transparent love is that it's the proper attitude to have in such a situation. The mere loving isn't what's morally good. It's a good thing to have true of oneself, but it's not a morally praiseworthy action. If I don't have that kind of love for my children, something has gone wrong, so it's definitely good if I have it. In fact, I have a duty to pursue having that kind of love. A given instance of expressing that love isn't moral, but what's moral is seeking to have that kind of love, and I should do that because it's the right kind of love to have. For most people this comes naturally, but that's because it doesn't take much to fulfill this duty for most people. For those who are constructed in a way that's less conducive to developing such feelings naturally, however, the moral duty will loom large. Someone who is autistic may actually be like that, with a diminished capacity to form relational bonds. For an autistic person anticipating parenthood, developing in one's abilities to form such relational attachment is paramount if Laurence is right that parental love of this sort is as important as he says it is. It's thus a duty to pursue. We just don't think about it because we don't think as much about the unusual case of someone who doesn't have these natural abilities. So in the end I don't think parental love as Laurence describes it is a counter-example to Kant's claim that moral action is only for the sake of duty. I think rather that Laurence's own account of what's going on with parental love confirms Kant's statement, as I read Kant.
Posted by Jeremy at 10:35 PM
Is Parental Love Transparent?
Laurence Thomas argues in Living Morally that parental love is transparent. He distinguishes between opaque and transparent love, borrowing the terms from philosophy of language. Opaque love "is love for a person under a certain description of that person, where the description makes reference to various attributes of the individual" (Living Morally, p.46). Transparent love is love that is not according to such a description.
It occurred to me as I was looking again at his account of parental love as transparent that I'm not sure he's technically correct. He defines transparent love as love for someone but not under some description. The reason for this is that parental love doesn't have any conditions other than that this is one's child. But isn't that still love for the person under some description?
It's true that this description couldn't fail to hold of this child once it does hold. If my child is my child, she will never cease to be my child. Of course, it's epistemically possible that one might find out that the baby one took home from the hospital is not one's own child due to baby-switching. If the discovery is too late to switch back, perhaps the love will still remain at the same level, but will it still be parental love if you discover that a child you have had for a week isn't really your biological child, and the real biological parent wants to switch back? I should point out that Laurence doesn't think parental love remains transparent, but he does think it's transparent from the outset and is in fact a paradigm case of transparent love. What I'm wondering with this example is whether this shows that any parent who would do this did not really have parental love as Laurence defines it.
Let me see if I can make my point clearer with possible worlds talk. World A is the actual world. World B is epistemically a duplicate of World A from my point of view up until two weeks after my child is born, but in World B the child my duplicate takes home from the hospital isn't his progeny. If he finds out three weeks later that this child had been switched with his in the hospital, he may well cease to love this child in a parental way and seek to switch them back, wanting his own child back. Now the only difference between me and this duplicate at the point just before he finds out is that his belief is false. If his love is thus not transparent, because of the ability to lose it by finding out that it is not his child, then why is mine transparent? It happens to be metaphysically impossible for me to find out such a thing, so it's strange to speak of what would happen were I to find such a thing out. Still, I'm intrinsically just like this guy, who might well upon finding out the truth cease to have what's distinctive of parental love. That means parental love is love for someone as that someone falls under a description, the description of being one's child.
Now I don't think this hurts Laurence's overall thesis. Metaphysically speaking, if she's my child then she will never lose that characteristic. This seems to be all Laurence needs for his overall thesis that parental love isn't like romantic love in being dependent on easily changeable features. Still, I don't think it's transparent according to his account of transparent love. I'm not even sure transparent love is humanly possible given how concept-laden our understanding of the world is, including our understanding of each other. I'm not even sure transparent love would be a good thing. Does it even make sense to love someone or something without some basis for love? Does it make sense to love someone or something when there's nothing about the object of one's love that one appreciates?
Posted by Jeremy at 10:32 PM | Comments (5)
May 26, 2005
Philosophers' Carnival XIV Plug
We're up to the next Philosophers' Carnival, and embarassingly OrangePhilosophy hasn't even had a post since the last one. The information on submissions and all that is here. Submissions need to be in by the end of the week.
Posted by Jeremy at 9:10 PM
May 3, 2005
Philosophers' Carnival XIII Plug
The 13th Philosophers' Carnival was going to be this week, but the busy time of year has led to its being pushed back until next week. Submit a post here. See the new submissions policy here.
Posted by Jeremy at 11:06 PM