The Reasons of Love by Harry G.Frankfurt

Author:Harry G.Frankfurt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2008-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

Three

The Dear Self

1There are some things that practically no one can help caring about. For the most part, this is all to the good. It would generally be agreed that, with regard to many of the things that are almost universally loved, it is in fact desirable that everyone love them. We are encouragingly reassured by the fact that nearly all of us love living, love our children, love being in rewarding relationships with others, and so on. The more or less unlimited incidence of these predilections is, we believe, a benign feature of human nature. It ensures that practically everyone is powerfully committed to a set of what practically everyone recognizes as legitimate and indispensable goods.

There is, however, at least one important exception to this. It is widely presumed that for a person to love himself is so natural as to be more or less unavoidable;but it is also widely presumed that this is not such a good thing. Many people—especially when they imagine that the propensity to self-love is both ubiquitous and essentially ineradicable—believe that this headlong tendency of most of us to love ourselves is a grievously injurious defect of human nature. In their view, it is largely self-love that makes it impossible for us to devote ourselves sufficiently and in a suitable way—that is, selflessly—to other things that we love or that it would be good for us to love. Loving oneself is, they think, a serious and often crippling impediment to caring appropriately not only about the requirements of morality but also about important nonmoral goods and ideals. The allegation that we are too deeply immersed in self-love is frequently offered, indeed, as identifying an almost insurmountable obstacle to our living as we should.

2Kant is among those who are especially dismayed and discouraged by the supposedly ubiquitous and relentless grip of self-love. The fact that people love themselves troubles him because he sees it as a formidable barrier to the advance of morality. In his view, it almost inevitably means that, regardless of what people may do, their motives when they act will not be the motives that morality requires.

At the beginning of the Second Section of his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, 1 Kant reflects upon the circumstance that, as it seems to him, it is practically impossible for us ever to know with any real assurance that what a person has done possesses genuine moral worth. He is struck by how irredeemably uncertain we must always be concerning whether people can properly be regarded as having actually been virtuous. The difficulty that bothers him does not arise from doubts as to our ability to identify which action, in the pertinent circumstances, the laws of morality prescribe. For Kant, that is the easy part. The serious problem in arriving at judicious moral evaluations of what people do lies, as he sees it, in the impenetrable obscurity of human motivation.

Even when it is clear that what a person has done conforms entirely—so far as

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