Self-hatred, self-love, and value

Käte Abramson

Adam Leite

pp. 75-90

in: Christian Maurer, Tony Milligan, Kamila Pacovská (eds), Love and its objects, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

Abstract

According to a time-honored tradition, love is a response to value. For some kinds of love, this view is plausible. Certain forms of other-directed love prominent in friendship and romantic contexts, for instance, are arguably a proper response to good character traits of the beloved as manifested in interaction with the lover (Abramson & Leite 2011). However, not all forms of love are responses to value in just this way. For instance, a parent's love for a young child cannot be understood as a response to good character, since young children don't yet have moral characters. If love is a response to value, then, it may respond to different kinds of values in different cases. And recognition of this variation raises the possibility of a deeper divergence: perhaps there are forms of love that are not responses to antecedent value at all, yet are ways of valuing the loved object.¹