How Do I Love Thee?

What is good about loving and being loved? What distinguishes different types of love? Are children essential to a loving relationship? And how do you decide when to end a relationship?

In this series of four discussions, Austen McDougal (NYU) will explore the ethics of love and breakups. Dinner will be provided. Please RSVP for each session on the individual pages linked below.

Schedule

Monday, february 23 at 6:00 PM | The Good of Love

Setting aside instrumental benefits, what is good about loving and being loved? Does the answer depend on love taking a specific form? Where do we even get our notions of love from in the first place? Is it preferable to be loved no matter what, or instead to be loved for your good qualities?

Reading: Tony Milligan’s “Love and Acceptance.”

Monday, March 2 at 6:00 PM | Defining the Relationship

What distinguishes different kinds of love and the characteristic relationships that accompany love? Does the answer depend on an explicit voluntary commitment, on social convention, on nature, or something else? Aristotle‘s influential analysis classifies friendships in terms of what you get out of them; is that right, and can it be extended to other types of relationships as well?

Reading: excerpt from C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves.

Monday, March 9 at 6:00 PM | Creating Life

The decision whether to have children adds a special wrinkle to the question whether to begin a relationship. Unlike other potential relationships, there is no child around for you to love and base your decision on. Yet we may well hope to love future children. Is this overly sentimental in the face of what is a weighty, pragmatic decision? Can love—for the child, or for others—still play some important role in the decision?

Reading: essay by Lara Buchak.

Monday, March 23 at 6:00 PM | Ending a Relationship

Ending a loving relationship is extremely hard. (And it's worth pausing to reflect on why there might not be as much philosophical reflection on it as you might expect.) How do you decide whether to do so: are there any guardrails between the poles of absolute commitment and total liberty? And if you do end things, how direct and immediate should the process be?

Reading: Agnes Callard’s “Breaking Points.”