Animals and the Capacity for Love

Abstract

It is my intention to make some large and disputable claims. What I want to promote is an understanding of love that is neglected, and to some extent simply dismissed, by Harry Frankfurt, David Velleman, Niko Kolodny, and (more recently) Bennett Helm.¹ I want to take seriously the idea that at least some nonhuman animals can both love and be loved and that they can do so even though love involves caring in an intimate manner. This is a claim that has gained a foothold in disciplines such as ethology and evolutionary biology as part of a broader move toward the recognition of animal emotions (Bekoff 2002, pp. 20–1; King 2013). In a sense, it is a local application of Darwin’s claim that ‘[the difference between] man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind. We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals’ (Darwin 1871, p. 128). Whatever we make of Darwin’s appeal to the higher and the lower, his emphasis here is upon continuity of a sort that applies even in the case of love.