On the Value of Relationships
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ON THE VALUE OF RELATIONSHIPS by Sandy Gillian Koullas A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland March, 2017 © 2017 Sandy Koullas All Rights Reserved Abstract My dissertation provides an account of the nature, value, and reasons arising out of close personal relationships. I begin by providing an analysis of the attitude of close personal love, which I construe as a response to the beloved’s system of values as expressed through the beloved’s character. My account emphasizes certain ways in which human beings are imperfect, and suggests that we love people in part for these imperfections. Relationships grounded in this love have value for their participants because they are useful, they can transform the character of experiences, they facilitate self-understanding, and enhance individual agency. Because of their distinctive value, relationships give rise to particular classes of reasons for their participants—reasons to favor loved ones, increase the potential range of shared experiences, and take good care of oneself. Because their value is basic and in part impersonal, certain relationship-specific goods give rise to reasons for us all not only to respect existing relationships but also to take steps towards becoming better potential participants in relationships. Finally, I consider the implications of my work for the larger conversation in ethics concerning the potential for conflict between reasons of partiality and those of impartiality. I consider several influential attempts to address this problem of conflict, but argue that each fails in its own way. I conclude that the value of relationships is such that it recommends partiality but also very likely serves impartial concerns. Relationships have a distinctive, genuine, and deep practical importance that is perhaps more in harmony with morality than may be obvious, but that nevertheless is liable to come into conflict with morality for deep, structural reasons. ii Committee Members: Dr L. Nandi Theunissen (primary advisor) Dr Richard Bett (second reader) Dr Hilary Bok Dr Leonardo Lisi Dr William Egginton (committee chair) iii Acknowledgments In addition to the immensely helpful feedback from my primary advisor, Nandi Theunissen, and my second reader, Richard Bett, I have had the benefit of comments from, or productive conversations with, the following people: Peter Achinstein, Hilary Bok, Jonathon Hricko, J. Joe Koullas, Adrienne Martin, Joshua McBee, Thaddeus Metz, Kevin Powell, Julie Reid, Eamon Roach, Helen Zhou, and various undergraduate students at the Johns Hopkins University who have taken my classes over the last three years. Earlier drafts of portions of this dissertation were presented at the American Philosophical Association Central Division Meeting in Kansas City, Missouri, in March 2017, the Northwest Philosophy Conference in Spokane, Washington, in October 2016, and several sessions of the Hammond Society Colloquia and Prometheus Seminar Series of the Johns Hopkins University Philosophy Department between 2013 and 2016. Parts of Chapter 4 (Section 2.2.2) will appear as part of my contribution, “Love, Practical Reasons, and African Philosophy,” to The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy, ed. Adrienne Martin (forthcoming). The emotional support provided by the Dissertation Group at the Johns Hopkins University Counseling Center, led by Dr Barbara Baum, was invaluable. Finally, there would have been no inspiration for this particular dissertation without the relationships I treasure with my dear friends and life partner. For that, and much, much else besides, I thank them. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 – AN ANALYSIS OF CLOSE PERSONAL LOVE 8 Section 1 – Desiderata 10 Section 2 – Love as “Really Seeing” a Deeper Something 14 Section 3 – Love as Endorsement of a System of Values 23 Section 4 – Love as Separable from Relationships 33 Section 5 – Character, Imperfection, and the Substitution Problem 44 Conclusion 56 CHAPTER 2 – THE VALUE AND REASONS OF CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS FOR THEIR PARTICIPANTS 58 Section 1 – Value, Reasons, and the Relation Between Them 61 Section 2 – The Value of Close Personal Relationships 67 Section 3 – The Reasons Relationships Generate for Their Participants 81 Conclusion 88 CHAPTER 3 – THE IMPERSONAL VALUE AND PARTICIPANT -NEUTRAL REASONS OF RELATIONSHIPS 90 Section 1 – Relationships as Impersonally Valuable 95 1.1. Imperfectly Systematic Value Systems 97 1.2. Less Than Perfect Values 98 1.3. Imperfectly Expressing Our Values 104 First Conclusion – The Basic, Versatile, and Therefore Impersonal Value of Relationships 108 Section 2 – Reasons to Engage with Relationship-Specific Goods 113 2.1. Reasons to Take Care of One’s Capacity for Reciprocity 116 v 2.2. Reasons to Cultivate New Interests 119 Conclusion 125 CHAPTER 4 – RELATIONSHIPS AND THE BIGGER PICTURE: PARTIALITY AND IMPARTIALITY IN PRACTICAL REASON 127 Section 1 – The Moral Flavor of Some Relationship-Generated Reasons 129 Section 2 – The Conflict Between Impartial Morality and Some Relationship- Generated Reasons 134 2.1. Non-Moral Motives Within a Moral System 137 2.2. Relationships as Bearers of Moral Value 144 2.2.1. Velleman’s Account of Love 144 2.2.2. An African Ethical Approach 148 2.3. Downplaying the Importance of Morality 161 Section 3 – The Difficulty of Separating Impartial and Partial Reasons 166 foo Conclusion 174 BIBLIOGRAPHY 177 CURRICULUM VITAE 182 vi INTRODUCTION 1 For many of us, close relationships—like friendship and romantic partnership—are among the most valued parts of our lives. Our friendships help structure our day-to-day lives, and relationships are often among the most important factors influencing major life decisions, such as where to live and whether to have children. Our friends and loved ones are where we turn for solace when personal tragedies strike, and it is with them that we celebrate our happiest moments. The role of these close relationships is not always positive; our friends and loved ones can be sources of the worst emotional pain if we lose them, or in cases of disagreement and conflict. But the absence of such relationships is often keenly felt as a profound sort of loneliness that is not easily remedied. In this dissertation, I explore the value of these relationships, and the way that they give rise to reasons. I build an account that ascribes to close personal relationships a value that is distinctive and significant. My account pays particular attention to certain ways in which human beings are imperfect, and explains how relationships—and the love that grounds them—respond to human imperfections. I argue that we love people in part for their imperfections, not merely in spite of them. Further, relationships can be good for us in part because of our imperfections. While some of the claims I make in the chapters that follow apply to various types of relationships, including familial ones and those between colleagues, for example, my intended focus is only what I call close personal relationships. The paradigmatic examples of close personal relationships are life partnerships and close long-term friendships between adults. I focus on these relationships because they have certain interesting features that I think set them apart from other kinds (such as familial relationships). First, they are typically voluntary in a way that other relationships are not; to some extent at least, we choose who will be our friends and partners. Second, they are typically understood to be relationships between peers or equals in a way that many other relationships are not. Families, workplaces, 2 and other organizations or structures within which relationships are formed often impose particular hierarchies or power structures that will have an impact on the relationships formed within them. I am more interested in relationships between (more-or-less) equals, which are entered into (more-or-less) freely. Finally, I have chosen to focus on these sorts of relationships because they seem to be of a rather special importance in our lives—consider their ubiquity as a theme in art and popular culture—but also relatively under-explored in ethics, at least in a systematic way. Relationships are acknowledged and taken into consideration in ethical theory, especially in the last four decades following the attention drawn to them by critics of modern moral philosophy such as Bernard Williams. But they are typically treated together with other kinds of relationships at least, and often also together with personal interests and projects in general. There are more thorough treatments of particular kinds of relationship to be found in the work of the ancients—notably Plato and Aristotle—but among the problems with those accounts is the fact that our world, our societies, and our ideals have changed a good deal since they were written. A new comprehensive account of the ways that close personal relationships in particular have significance in our lives will be helpful, I believe, in answering more particular questions that may arise, such as whether they can ever legitimately take precedence over impartial values when the two values clash. Building and defending such a comprehensive account is my goal in the chapters that follow. I begin with an analysis of the sort of love that forms the basis of close personal relationships. Working up to my account via critiques of the influential views of J. David Velleman, Harry Frankfurt, and Niko Kolodny, I construe the attitude of close personal love as an attitude of endorsement toward the value system of a loved one, as expressed through 3 the loved one’s character. A person’s character, on my view, is a uniquely identifying, unifying structure that underlies a person’s behavioral tendencies and dispositions, and is informed by the person’s attitudes toward things as being valuable. I draw attention to three ways in which human value systems are imperfect: These systems are imperfectly systematic, they have imperfect elements, and they are often imperfectly manifested in the person’s character.