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May 27, 2005
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 May 27, 2005 10:32 PM
Comments
We can wonder whether 'transparent love' makes sense by thinking about opaque and transparent hate. When a father hates his child, it would seem to always be opaque. 'Timmy's a loser, irresponsible,' etc. I don't know what transparent parental hate would even be like. 'I just hate Timmy, full stop. Not qua-my-child, in regards to how a child should be, moral being, or what have you. I just hate him.'
I'm pretty unclear about what transparent/opaque love mean here, mostly b/c there's little info you provide. It sounds pretty similar to what people mean by unconditional or unqualified love.
Posted by: marksteen at May 30, 2005 9:26 AM
I think that was a problem in the original presentation. He defines opaque love pretty clearly, and then he talks about transparent love in contrast without stating a definition in the same terms (unless I just didn't see it).
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce at May 30, 2005 2:58 PM
I think Thomas has in mind not transparent (vs. opaque) love, but rather love de re rather than love de dicto. Love de re already has some very interesting discussion (see Robert Kraut in Midwest Studies and Mark Bernstein in Southern Journal of Philosophy). Transparent love would not be love under no description, it would rather be love under all coreferring descriptions. But there is no such love. Certainly I could say to you, "so you love the guy who stole the blanket from baby suzy"? And though you have unconditional love for this person, your answer may well be "no, what creep did that?" You might simply not know that this is the one you love unconditionally. These are almost too obvious to point out. There are just too many descriptions under which you might fail to recognize the beloved. So I'm guessing that Thomas really has in mind is love of the person (under no description) or love de re.
Posted by: Mike at June 4, 2005 9:04 PM
I'm not sure why loving someone is inconsistent with thinking they were a jerk for stealing a baby's blanket, so I don't think that's a convincing argument.
My impression is that transparent love lines up with de re love, while opaque love lines up with de dicto love in the same way that transparent and opaque contexts will match up with de re and de dicto statements in the case of reference. I think what you're suggesting is exactly what he meant to begin with. I don't see how my argument doesn't cut against what you're saying any less than it counts against his claim. Parental love doesn't seem to me to be love under no description.
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce at June 4, 2005 10:24 PM
_I'm not sure why loving someone is inconsistent with thinking they were a jerk for stealing a baby's blanket, so I don't think that's a convincining argument_.
I never suggested that these were inconsistent. I said that if love were transparent then 'S loves P' (if true) would be true for all coreferential substitutions for 'P'. Suppose S loves the person who saved Jones. And suppose the person who saved Jones is identical to the person who killed Jules. It might well fail to be true that S does not love (but rather hates) the person who killed Jules. You point out (more or less) "well, I don't see why someone could not love someone who killed another person". Yes, of course, but not quite to the point. The point is that S will not know (nor will anyone else) every description under which P falls. So there will be some description of P under which S will not know P and so will not love P under that description. This is why (I suggested) Thomas would have done better to describe his position as love de re and not transparent love. Perhaps that is what he meant all along. But then it would be nice to have said so.
On a different score, I didn't address the question of whether your objections apply to what I said. I haven't read them closely enough to tell. What I addressed was the question of how to describe Thomas's view.
Posted by: Mike at June 5, 2005 10:38 AM