Abstract
According to a time-honored tradition, love is a response to value. For some kinds of love, this view is plausible. Certain forms of other-directed love prominent in friendship and romantic contexts, for instance, are arguably a proper response to good character traits of the beloved as manifested in interaction with the lover (Abramson & Leite 2011). However, not all forms of love are responses to value in just this way. For instance, a parent’s love for a young child cannot be understood as a response to good character, since young children don’t yet have moral characters. If love is a response to value, then, it may respond to different kinds of values in different cases. And recognition of this variation raises the possibility of a deeper divergence: perhaps there are forms of love that are not responses to antecedent value at all, yet are ways of valuing the loved object.1
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© 2014 Kate Abramson and Adam Leite
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Abramson, K., Leite, A. (2014). Self-hatred, Self-love, and Value. In: Maurer, C., Milligan, T., Pacovská, K. (eds) Love and Its Objects. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137383310_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137383310_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-48048-7
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