Reasons to Love
My friend's in love with an app, and I can't say why that's wrong.
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.
The episodes
Each episode builds on the one before, and the finale hands the question back to you sharper, not settled.
9 of 9 transcripts are readable now — audio is coming.
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1
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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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