Love and Amorality
What is love? Some would say that love is elicited by something that we rate very positively. You would not say you love Beethoven if you did not rate his music highly, or at least the experience of listening to it; and a person would not be your beloved if you did not think him or her the epitome of beauty or kindness or some other sterling and perhaps unique quality. Others would say that if you aren’t prepared to sacrifice yourself for the other, or some such thing, it’s not love. The latter are moralists. But both are moralists in the broad sense of assuming that everything has a definition, and hence they expect my opening question to have an answer. I believe, however, that any kind of moralism is anathema to love. There are many kinds of love and all are fully love, it seems to me. What prompts me now to write about love nevertheless, and even ask the question, is a sudden sense of there being one salient feature any type of love possesses, and one