Chapter 1 - Is Love Nonviolent?

Summary

We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.

Iris Murdoch

This chapter arises out of a larger piece of work on the philosophy of love that I am provisionally calling Love as a Guide to Morality. Simply put, the world would be a better, less violent place if more people were more loving. The question in the title of the chapter was one posed to me by an anonymous reviewer of a paper I read at the annual meeting of the North American Society for Social Philosophy in 2005. I had presented a paper, the basis of which was an assumption that love is nonviolent. This did not seem at all obvious to my reviewer, who I suspect was an empiricist. On the reviewer's recommendation, the journal editors rejected my paper. The rejection has provided a fruitful area for research and further thought. The assumption that love is nonviolent, as found in the writings of Gandhi (2002 , 2006), King (1986), and Nhat Hanh (1993), needs a supporting argument. It is clear that the loves we know—human loves between parent and child, between lovers and between friends—often have an element of violence. Sometimes this is actual physical violence (the parental spanking of a child out of deep love for the child's well-being, often called “tough love”) and sometimes as emotional and mental violence (the jealous overprotectiveness of the lover that stifles the personality of the loved one). With hindsight, in my former paper there was something of a disconnect in making too quickly the move from the loves we know to an assumption that love is nonviolent and that it is, therefore, a sufficient basis for morality. It is clear to me now that I had fallen foul of Hume's critique and Moore's naturalistic fallacy: I was trying to read an “ought” of morality from the “is” of human love, to derive value from selective facts. There is also the foundational question of why I want to privilege love as a basis for ethics: Why not fairness? Why not happiness? For the utilitarian pragmatist, love is too problematic as a basis for morality. Pleasure and pain are, in experience, measurable to a degree.