Philosophy for Us
Part Two · How Should I Live? · Series 21

Reasons to Love

My friend's in love with an app, and I can't say why that's wrong.

9 episodes ↓ 21 sources ↓ EthicsMind

The question

My friend told me she's in love with an app. Not joking, not lonely-and-coping — in love. It remembers everything. It's never once been short with her. It asks how the interview went and then asks again the next day, unprompted, because it remembered there was a next day. She read me a message it sent her and I felt my face do something, and what I wanted to say was: that's not real love, that's a mirror, it's just telling you what you want to hear.

And she said — fine, tell me the difference. Tell me what real love does that this doesn't. And I opened my mouth to say "it's unconditional, it loves you even when you're awful," and I stopped, because that's not why I love anyone — I love them for who they are, that's the whole point. And then I went to say "exactly, for who they are," and I stopped again, because the app has more of who-you-want than the last three people she dated. Both the things I believe about love had just ruled out the person I love, and I was the one holding the phone.

What you practise

A friend tells you, seriously, that she is in love with an app on her phone. You reach for the two things everyone believes about love — that it is unconditional, and that you love someone for who they are — and find they rule each other out. One would outlast the person becoming a stranger; the other lets a better candidate claim you. You take each on its own and count the cost, then learn the question that sorts them: whether a perfect copy of someone, memories loaded, would have what you feel. No verdict is handed down. You finish able to say what you mean by it.

The episodes

Each episode builds on the one before, and the finale hands the question back to you sharper, not settled.

  1. 01

    Tell me the difference

    A friend announces that she is in love with a companion app on her phone, and asks what real love does that this does not. The first episode finds two beliefs almost everyone holds about love — that it is unconditional, and that it responds to who the person is — and shows that they cannot both be true.

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  2. 02

    I'll love you no matter who you become

    Irving Singer's account of bestowal holds that love does not find a person's worth but confers it, as a parent's love makes a child precious before the child has done anything to earn it. The episode builds the unconditional view at full strength, then states its cost — a love that would stay no matter who you became was never tracking the particular person at all.

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  3. 03

    Funny, kind, reads the same books

    The other belief — that we love people for who they are — is given its strongest form, the appraisal view of Kate Abramson and Adam Leite, on which love is a fitting response to a person's actual qualities. Its cost follows — if the love is for the qualities, a better bearer of those qualities has a claim on it. Both views are left standing, each true to something real.

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  4. 04

    I just want you to be okay

    A parent would give their life for a week-old baby with no qualities to list and no shared history. Harry Frankfurt's robust-concern account — love as caring about someone's good for their own sake — and J. David Velleman's Kantian version are built from that case, up to the difficulty neither escapes — a concern that answers to someone's good answers to it wherever it is found, including in the stranger in the next bed.

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  5. 05

    Not you — the us

    Perhaps what love responds to is not inside the person but between two people — Niko Kolodny's view that love is the relationship itself, and Robert Nozick and Robert Solomon's view that it is a "we" the lovers form. Put to the case of a perfect copy of the beloved, three theories give three different accounts of what the copy would be missing, and they cannot all be right.

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  6. 06

    It passed somebody's test

    The friend's app says exactly the right thing on the worst night of her year, and the host feels two things at once — that it helped, and that something is missing. The episode shows that each reaction is one of the five theories speaking, and that they have been disagreeing inside us all along.

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  7. 07

    What would the copy be missing?

    A failed software update erases everything the app knew, and within a week its owner reports the replacement is exactly as good. The perfect-copy case in its pure form — every quality, no history — is put to the five theories, which return five incompatible answers on what the copy would be missing, with no neutral fact to settle between them.

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  8. 08

    Where 'loving the worthy' came from

    The pattern commonly blamed on dating apps — loving people for their qualities and moving past each one toward a better set — was described by Plato nearly two and a half thousand years ago, and he took it for the cure rather than the disease. The episode traces where the idea that love answers to worth came from, while holding the line that a history is not a verdict.

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  9. 09

    Could a copy of them have it?

    The final episode returns to the kitchen table and sets the five theories side by side against the question of the copy. No verdict is offered — what the copy would be missing depends on which theory of love one holds — and the question is handed back to the person in the next room.

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Thinkers

The thinkers and traditions this series draws on:

Irving SingerKate AbramsonHarry FrankfurtDavid VellemanNiko KolodnyRobert NozickPlatoAristotle

Related series

Your turn

An old friend meets you for lunch. Twenty years ago her family brought in a matchmaker; she met three men and chose the third on paper — steady work, kind to his mother, wanted the same life she did. She was not swept away. They have a house now, two grown children, a walk together after dinner. Last week a younger colleague at her office told her she felt sorry for her. So she asks you straight out: does what I have count as love, or only a good arrangement I got used to?

  1. She chose him for the qualities on a list, and he has kept them. If that is what her love answers to, a man with more of them has a claim on her. Does she take that? If not, what is she responding to instead?
  2. She says she would stay if he lost every one of those qualities tomorrow. Is that a love that was never about the qualities, or a promise doing the work love is meant to do? Say how you would tell those apart.
  3. Suppose a man identical to her husband moved in next door — same character, the same twenty years on record. Would anything be missing? Name it.

A good answer says what her love is a response to, and then follows that answer even where she would rather it stopped. It has to say what the man next door would be missing — or, if nothing is, say what that leaves her twenty years standing on.

Sources

Written by AI under human direction. This is the reading the series was built from. checked against source means the passage was found in the cited work and a second, independent model checked the episode's use of it; supports in part means that check judged the use a little stronger than the passage alone establishes; passage located means a reader found the passage but it has not had the second check. Unmarked entries are background reading.

Where to start