Tracks 1. Early Morning Late At Night - 3. K9P - 4. Shame And Solution - 5. Lawdy Miss Clawdy - 6. Vietnam Rose - 7.
Take Love Away - 8. Odgkin Kane - 9. Parting B-side - In The Year A-side - Wonderland Of Love B-side - Artist descriptions on Last. Feel free to contribute! All user-contributed text on this page is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License ; additional terms may apply. Don't want to see ads? Upgrade Now. The doxastic aspect of loving that I will be defending here is different from, although not a competitor to, the one Velleman defends; it may be that both are necessary features of love.
My claim is not that the lover sees the beloved as valuable, but that he has a tendency to see her as good. This is not to say that the lover will publicly vouch for the goodness of the beloved, but he will have a tendency to believe in her goodness whether he asserts it or not. In the remainder of this section, I will clarify my description of this tendency, and cite evidence that it exists; in the next section, I will spell out its role in beloved-induced shame.
Jones the beloved. My claim, however, is a good deal weaker; it is not that believing in the goodness of a beloved either motivates or embodies the object of all love, but rather, and quite simply, that it is a feature of all love. I by no means wish to suggest that a lover believes that his beloved is good in all ways or all situations. Endorsing the goodness of a beloved is not inconsistent with seeing her as slow, boring, or unmotivated.
Loving someone is not in tension with recognizing the limitations of her capabilities. As Roger Scruton—the only writer I have found who explicitly discusses this feature of loving8—writes, as someone who loves you, I can make allowances for your laziness, your selfishness, your lack of essential refinements. But can I make allowances for your cowardice, your viciousness, your character, say, as a murderer or rapist?
However, neither Scruton nor I would want to deny this. My claim is that loving someone involves or entails believing that she is a good person. This is not the same thing as believing that she always has or always will act well. Nonetheless, believing that someone is a good person involves an expectation that she will act well. Accordingly, because lovers believe that their beloveds are good persons, they have persistent expect- ations that their beloveds will act well, and when those expectations are not met, their love can be challenged.
Loving someone thus creates something like a barrier or impediment to accepting that she has done wrong. At one end of the spectrum, a deeply loving spouse or parent will have an extremely difficult time accepting that his life partner or child has committed a crime that he sees as heinous. At the other end of the spectrum, even a new romantic lover requires more evidence to believe that his partner has lied or broken her promise than he does to believe that a stranger or acquaintance has done the same.
I do not deny that a lover can fully recognize that his beloved has done wrong, nor do I deny that a wrongdoer—even a very serious wrongdoer—can be loved. The claim is rather that it is difficult to truly love a serious wrongdoer while being clear-sighted about the extent of her wrongdoing and her responsibility for it. Lovers have a belief that those they love are good persons, and that inclines them to a defeasible but persistent tendency to believe that 6 Plato, Symposium, D and E.
See, e. We expect those who love us to think well of us; we expect our lovers to give us the benefit of doubt. This applies, primarily, to our moral lives. We expect those who love us, at a minimum, to require stronger evidence to believe that we have done wrong, and we justifiably feel disappointed and betrayed if they do not.
We expect our lovers to expect us to be good. Scruton , These mechanisms come into play when we find out that someone we love has done something immoral, or as we come to love someone we have always known to be immoral. The existence of these mechanisms is, it seems to me, the strongest evidence that there is a barrier to loving someone and accepting that she has done wrong.
One way to avoid loving someone and believing that she has done wrong would be to no longer love her. While I am sympathetic to much of what Keller says, I think that he is wrong to claim that this is a matter of a conflict of norms.
Friendship and love do not provide us with reasons to believe; rather, the effect that loving has on believing in the goodness of the beloved must be a surreptitious, sub-intentional effect. Michael recalls that some of his peers tried to relieve the tension by abandoning or weakening their relationships with their parents. But I suspect that … I would continue to love them anyhow.
What if he discovered his son violently raping someone? What if he discovered his daughter soberly bludgeoning a dog to death? In any event, lovers threatened by the tension between loving and acknowledging the immorality of their beloveds have available alternative means by which they can avoid or resolve the tension, namely as the result of a weakening or elimination of the recognition that their beloveds are immoral. These are ways in which lovers continue to believe that their beloveds are good persons even though they appear to have acted badly, ways in which they can deny that their beloveds have acted badly or distance their beloveds from their actions.
There are at least three ways in which lovers avoid fully recognizing the wrong of what their beloveds do. Perhaps the most extreme is a matter of self-deception. A stock philosophical example, often trotted out in discussions of wishful thinking, involves a mother who cannot believe that her son has committed the crimes of which he is accused. The example would have no grip in reality were we to replace the mother by a total stranger; if I have no relationship with someone, then there is, mutatis mutandis, no block to my believing that he has done something wrong.
My love for you, my husband or father, involved as you are in organized crime, may lead me to a distorted evaluation of your activities. Perhaps I am led to place the family in a central ethical position: killing or hurting someone is not wrong, if that person was outside the family and was endangering the family, because the family must be protected as a unit. In this way, I can continue loving you, as I think that your killing someone outside the family was, ultimately, the right thing to do.
There are an extraordinary number of ways in which this can be done, and we are very adept at doing so. The beloved did not know what she was doing, she did not intend to cause harm, she was under the influence of alcohol or drugs, or she was led to do so by her friends. At their limit, such moves appeal to very distant conditions that, in spite of our not being able to clearly spell out their force, seem to us to distance the beloved from responsibility for the action, and thus, from wrongdoing itself: the beloved was neglected as a child, or she had no role models to give her a moral education.
These are all ways of distancing the beloved from her wrongdoing and resolving any tension we might feel in loving her. Viewers of films with clear-cut villains—which include, perhaps most prominently, the genres of westerns, crime thrillers, and martial arts films—will know that the clear-cut villain cannot be shown as being loved.
Jones punishment, or death. However, as we know from films that break out of these genres, to portray a villain or wrongdoer as being loved has a very different effect upon the viewer. The effect can be unsettling, as it is in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer , or it can verge on the comic, as it does in Natural Born Killers As a consequence, seeing someone as being loved is irreconcilable with wholeheartedly seeing him as a villain.
No matter what he has done, his villainy is undermined by the presence of a person who loves him, and who does not see him as a clear-cut villain. The first, pointed out by Nozick, Helm, and many other writers on love, is that loving involves a kind of evaluative dependence upon the beloved.
The second commitment, which I defended in the previous section, is doxastic; lovers tend to believe that their beloveds are good people.
By itself, neither of these commitments is enough to explain beloved-induced shame. When the beloved does wrong, the lover is shown to have a false belief: the beloved is, after all, capable of wrongdoing. But a false belief is not sufficient for feeling shame. In combination, however, these two commitments can lead to shame, as together they amount to a particularly deep kind of endorsement: the lover believes in the beloved.
He takes her to be good, and he stakes the goodness of his life on that of hers. It is worth recalling the self-directed account of shame that, as I argued 15 I do not deny that other features of loving—e. I suspect that we would be unwilling to attribute the mental state of loving to someone who does not manifest this expectation; arguing for this would go some way toward establishing the conceptual necessity of the claim I am defending, but I will not pursue such an argument here.
The reality of my behavior falls short of who I think that I should be; I am disappointed in myself. Beloved-induced shame occurs because when I come to love you my expectations of myself incorporate my expectations of you. This occurs because of the particularly deep kind of endorsement involved in loving you. In loving someone, my endorsement of her goodness has changed me into someone whose life goes well only when her life goes well.
I champion her in virtue of her goodness, and when she acts badly, I—in virtue of that championing—do not live up to who I think I should be. In loving her I have backed a loser in the moral realm, and the result is my self-directed shame. When a teacher endorses a student for a further degree or a job, or when a high-profile figure publicly endorses a political candidate, and he is subsequently let down by the student or candidate, the result can be that the teacher or the high-profile figure feels shame.
The endorser stands by his student or his preferred candidate, in that he is willing to vouch for her, and he cares that the student or candidate succeeds in what she is setting out to do. So, if the student or candidate disappoints in some serious way, this can come back to cause the teacher or public figure shame.
We must not take this analogy too far. Unlike loving someone, the endorsements of a teacher or public figure are necessarily public, and often the main thing that they are staking is their reputations.
The lover stands with the beloved not in his role as teacher or public figure, but, we might say, as a human being. Nonetheless, the analogy is revealing; in both cases, it is the fact that one person—lover, teacher, public figure—is standing by and with another person that leaves the former susceptible to shame in virtue of how the latter behaves.
That a lover vouches for or endorses the beloved explains why beloved-induced moral shame is reflexive. In loving her, he has put himself on the line with her, and in virtue of this he is implicated in her wrongdoings. In endorsing others, we make ourselves vulnerable to what they do without necessarily contributing to what they do.
It would also be wrong to suggest that the ashamed lover does or should feel shame only for staking himself on the beloved; that is, that he should be ashamed for loving a wrongdoer. It may, indeed, be true that ashamed lovers sometimes regret continuing to love those who wrong, but this is a different matter from regretting the love one felt for her in the first place. In many cases, at least, I struggle to make sense of the latter response; I would not know what to make of someone who says that, after what his sister did, he regrets having loved her all those years they were growing up together.
This way of speaking makes it seem as if beloved-induced shame is not reflexive after all, and that we should—with Helm—conceive of beloved-induced shame as non-reflexive. However, our ways of describing beloved-induced shame are not unambiguous.
Given how I feel for her, her actions have generated my disgrace. In the case of the academic or the public figure, it is his career or reputation that has been hurt. In the case of the lover, it is his moral being; because of his moral commitment to the beloved, his person—who and what he morally stands for—has suffered. The view of love defended by Diotima, and endorsed by Socrates, places the desire for goodness at its center; loving is, at bottom, motivated by the desire to possess good things.
I have an enduring suspicion that what moves us to love is rarely so admirable. In sum, I have been arguing that we should conceive of beloved-induced shame as self- directed, in virtue of the fact that the lover has staked himself with his beloved.
The lover ties his life to that of the beloved, in the sense of it mattering deeply about how her life goes this is the affective element ; furthermore, and in the context of that mattering, he bears witness to her this is the doxastic element. He not only has a doxastic commitment to her not being the sort of person who does what he thinks is wrong, he stakes his own well-being on her not being that sort of person.
First, we can be ashamed of non-moral features of ourselves, like our bodies or our lack of education, and we are similarly susceptible to shame in virtue of non-moral shortcomings we perceive in those we love.
My account of beloved-induced shame requires the persistent belief that the beloved is a good person, but it is implausible to think that such a belief would play a role in non-moral beloved-induced shame. As a consequence, my account of beloved-induced moral shame does not allow me to explain analogous cases of non-moral shame. For the same reason, my account does not allow me to explain group-induced moral or non-moral shame.
Many groups that we belong to do not matter to us. I belong, for example, to the world-wide group of people who keep a fern in their bathrooms, but I doubt that any of the other members of that group could bring shame on me qua our membership in that group. However, I am vulnerable to shame in virtue of some of the other, more important, groups or institutions to which I belong. It is possible that what a fellow member of my country, culture, race, club, workplace, or family does can bring about my shame.
Blustein , Ch. The fact that I cannot use my account to explain these kinds of other-induced shame could be seen as a concern, as it opens the door to an explanation of beloved-induced moral shame that could offer a unifying explanation of all types of other-induced shame. In particular, one might think that the correct account of group-induced shame could also be used to explain both non-moral and moral beloved-induced shame. Beloved-induced shame, one might argue, is a special case of membership-shame.
When two people love each other, they thereby form a group, a group that is of central importance to each of their lives. Because it would appear to offer a unifying account all cases of other-induced shame, it could be argued, such an account is preferable to mine as an account of beloved-induced moral shame.
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