Respect and Love
1.
It is often taken for granted that love where it exists may be a primary feature of the relationship between people. No other properties or conditions need be present applied across the relationship for it to be said truly that the relationship is one of love. This essay will deny this claim. It will be argued that respect is a necessary condition for love. Respect first, then love. The essay concerns the relationship between adults only.
This is an essay in philosophical conceptual psychology. That is to say, it concerns what may follow logically from the meaning of certain concepts. It is not an empirical consideration of love that would involve the pursuit of factual evidence in the world.
By love here is meant the attitude whereby thoughts and actions lead one to value and care for someone to a high degree beyond that that might ordinarily apply to the way you consider and treat another human being. The concern is not with sexual romantic love – though there may be consideration to be drawn from what is said here for that too – but rather a mature love devoid of such considerations.
2.
At the outset we are not talking about unconditional love. By definition unconditional love requires no conditions. One loves someone no matter what, and that is an end to it. This is often thought of as an ideal of love, something rare and precious. However, unconditional love is best thought of not as an apogee of love on a sliding scale of degrees of love, but as a different kind of relationship from conditional love. Unconditional love is the kind of love that most obviously may exist between parent and child. Such love may manifest itself in various ways according to the character of the person doing the loving. The love is present regardless of both the good and the bad qualities of the loved person, which does not mean one need be unaware of those qualities. It is if one likes, unshakable. This we may note may explain why when our parents die and we become orphans, we feel such a great loss and a degree of insecurity, a sense of the firm earth pulled from beneath us. Unconditional love does not, or should not, require one to be a slave to the other person, doing their bidding, what they want, absolutely, but rather never abandoning wishing the best for them regardless of what they say and do. One does not abandon their needs, which may not be what they want. Such love may be manifest in all sorts of ways, and may involve a wide range of association with a person, but it is always there.
3.
No, what we are concerned with here is conditional love.
Some claim that in one sense it is the only true love precisely because its value derives from its being given freely and out of choice. But there is a paradox here. When someone says one loves someone, the loved one often wants to be secure in that love and not beset by a list of ifs and buts such that if these fail or apply the love will cease. But if on the other hand the love is an unconditional one, one might wonder where its value lies, for its presence does not derive from any act of choice based on the characteristics one has but is rather an unconsidered reflex. We want the love to be a result of the kind of person we are and yet want it to be unconditional and not dependent on those characteristics – that make us the person we are – remaining the same. Love ‘alters not, when alteration finds’.1 This seeming paradox is well explored by Jean-Paul Sartre, where he sums it up by saying of the loved one: ‘He wants to be loved by a freedom, but demands that this freedom as freedom should be no longer free.’.2 However, this is a different discussion from the one here and so will be left on the side for now.
4.
Now, there may be various conditions that apply to loving someone, both negative and positive. One might not love someone who has shown any degree of violence or aggression towards one. One may find it easy to love someone who is funny and hard to love someone who is boring. One may find it especially hard to start or continue to love someone who appears to show in the end no care or concern for you. Even in the cases of unrequited love, the person doing the loving may believe the other person loves them, even though they show no sign of it, perhaps even the opposite. Love may blind one to the true nature of the loved one, summoning up a view of them that is not in fact matched by reality.
It is extremely difficult to pin down any universally valid conditions that bring about or deny love.3 This is partly because love, like a meaningful life, is acutely determined by the particular character and sensibilities of the individual down to the subtle finest details and nuances.4 So we may leave consideration of various conditions for conditional love to one side, and note merely that there are conditions and that they vary uncountably in their nature. Except for one.
5.
That one condition is respect. This notion of respect has at its core Kant’s Categorical Imperative, that of never treating someone merely as a means but always as an end.5 The application to love of this Respect for Persons maxim is a particular case of a more general, indeed universal, application of the maxim giving the necessary and sufficient conditions for treating something as a person.
It is important to note that the maxim does not say that one should not treat someone as a means, but that one should not treat someone merely (sometimes translated as ‘simply’) as a means and not also as an end. To never treat someone (others) as a means would make life impossible. It would make it impossible, for example, to hire a taxi, and moreover for the taxi driver to take one somewhere. What the maxim precluded is treating someone as a thing, a mere means, with no regard to them as ends deserving respect.
It may seem odd at first as the meaning of the term ‘respect’ may evoke visions of obsequiousness kowtowing to someone or being overawed. That is not what is meant here.
What is meant is a form of respect that is a condition, one might say a conceptual precursor, to love proper. In order to truly love someone as a person one must first respect them in the sense of valuing the person as a person, and not thinking that one can ride roughshod over their will, their desires and wishes, indeed taking full account of those even whilst we may know not what they are. In short, one should not disregard but positively take into account their autonomy as a human being. For otherwise it is tantamount to treating them as a thing. Whatever one may do towards the other person then, even if it benefits them, cannot be done out of love for a person for one has not first shown them the respect that is required for the love to have as its object a person. One may say one can indeed love a thing. That may be so. But one would not be loving the thing as a person. To disregard someone’s will, their autonomy, is to take away the necessary and sufficient conditions for someone to be a person, and so whatever one may then do towards that person it cannot amount to love of them as a person. To disregard someone’s will is not the same as sometimes going against their will, or indeed going along with their will; it is rather to treat them as having no will at all, no will to be regarded, no will to be considered or not considered; thus, one then treats someone as a mere thing. One then treats a person as one would a table or a chair. Indeed it is worth noting that whether one does good or bad toward someone one will equally not be treating them as a person if one does not respect them in the sense given here.
Thus, in order to truly love someone one must first respect someone. That is respect that they have a will that is reflected in what they value, and also respect what their desires and wishes are. If one does not know what they are, one may respect them hypothetically, that is, that they will have their desires and wishes that one cannot ride roughshod over and may be quite specific to them. Crudely, one might say, one should not treat others as having no plans. That way one loves the person for the person they are. Love on this basis does not just mean a gushing outflowing of feeling towards someone, but rather a wish for the care and the best for that person based on a consideration of what they will and think, their values and priorities, not just on what the person who putatively loves them wants or wishes.
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Dr John Shand is a Visiting Fellow in Philosophy at the Open University. He studied philosophy at the University of Manchester and King’s College, University of Cambridge. He has taught at Cambridge, Manchester and the Open University. The author of numerous articles, reviews, and edited books, his own books include, Arguing Well (London: Routledge, 2000) and Philosophy and Philosophers: An Introduction to Western Philosophy, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2014).
Contact information:
- Dr John Shand, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, MK7 6AA, United Kingdom.
- https://open.academia.edu/JohnShand
- http://fass.open.ac.uk/philosophy/people
John Shand on Daily Philosophy:
Notes
William Shakpeeare, Sonnet 116. ↩︎
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness [1943] (Trans Hazel Barns, Intro Mary Warnock, Methuen & Co Ltd, 1977, Chapter Three, ‘Concrete Relations With Others’, § I ‘First Attitudes Towards Others: Love, Language, Masochism’, p. 367. ↩︎
See the poem by Kingsley Amis, ‘Three Scenarios: I – Reasons’. Collected Poems 1944-1979 (Hutchinson & Co, 1979) pp.126-127. ↩︎
See John Shand, ‘No such thing as the good-life: A critique and plea for ignorance’, Journal of Philosophy of Life Vol.8, No.2 (July 2018): 48-64 and ‘A Meaningful Life’, in Human Affairs, Volume 29, Issue 4 (Oct 2019) ↩︎
This is the second formulation of the Categorical Imperative as Respect for the Dignity of Persons. Kant’s Categorical Imperative, understood through the Formula of the End-in-Itself or Respect for the Dignity of Persons reads, ‘Handle so, daß du die Menschheit sowohl in deiner Person, als in der Person eines jeden andern jederzeit zugleich als Zweck, niemals bloß als Mittel brauchst.’ [‘Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always as an end and never merely as a means’.] Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals, Chapter II, AA 4:429. 9–12. It is sometimes claimed that Kant’s Categorical Imperative is ‘empty’ in that from it one may not derive any specific duties or forbid any maxims as impermissible. This I have argued elsewhere is a mistake. See, ‘Kant, Respect, and Hypothetical Acts’, in Philosophy Volume 90, Issue 03, July 2015, pp 505–518. ↩︎
