Love as a Moral Emotion

Daniel Nellor

J. David Velleman’s ‘Love as a Moral Emotion’ is an attempt to show that love need not conflict with morality, as the latter is defined by Kant.  He does this by moving away from a definition of love in terms of desire, and presenting it instead as a kind of appreciation, akin to Kantian respect.  In this paper I argue that this distinction is wrongly conceived, that love is both appreciative and conative, and further that the phenomenon Velleman points to as distinguishing love from respect – vulnerability – is inherently involved in respect as well.  I claim that the Kantian picture of an autonomous, rational self distorts our experience of love, and that we do better to understand love as revealing a pre-existing vulnerability that calls into question not only the Kantian picture of love, but of respect and of the self as well.