Love and Reasons: The Many Relationships Commenting on J.M.E. McTaggart's account of love, C.D. Broad said, "love is, in some respects, so sublime, and, in others, so ridiculous, and the two aspects are so closely intertwined, that it is not easy to keep a just mean between cheap cynicism and muddled mysticism" (1938, 129). He thought McTaggart came dangerously close to the mystical extreme, and I think many recent discussions have likewise been too high-minded. Broad hoped to avoid the contrary vice of cynicism by confining himself to "the prosaic paths of platitude and banality," and I plan to follow his lead. I'll argue that love is a complex of many elements and therefore has a complex relationship to reasons. While some elements are supported by reasons, others aren't; while some ground reasons, others don't. This is partly because reasons can bear on love at different points. There can be reasons to start a loving relationship; reasons to continue or end it once it's begun; and reasons, including moral ones, to act one way rather than another during it.
Thomas Hurka
https://thomashurka.com/writings/recently-published-papers/
Professor
Department of Philosophy
University of Toronto
**About the Speaker:**
My main area of research and teaching is moral and political philosophy, especially normative ethical theory. I’ve probably written most about perfectionist moral theories, in my books *[Perfectionism](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/perfectionism-9780195101164?q=Hurka&lang=en&cc=gb)* (Oxford University Press) and *[Virtue, Vice, and Value](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/virtue-vice-and-value-9780195158656?q=Hurka&lang=en&cc=gb)* (Oxford University Press), as well as in numerous articles. But I’ve also discussed the justification of punishment, population ethics, nationalism, friendship, and the morality of war. For a time I wrote a weekly ethics column for the Globe and Mail newspaper, which was great fun; a selection of my columns was published as *Principles: Short Essays on Ethics.*
In 2011 I published a non-academic or trade book called *[The Best Things in Life](https://global.oup.com/academic/search?q=Hurka&cc=gb&lang=en)* (Oxford University Press), about the many things — pleasure, knowledge, achievement, virtue, personal love — that can make your life desirable. In 2014 I published *[British Ethical Theorists From Sidgwick to Ewing](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/british-ethical-theorists-from-sidgwick-to-ewing-9780199233625?cc=gb&lang=en&#)* (Oxford University Press), about a group of moral philosophers who approached the subject in broadly similar ways and were active between around 1874 and 1959, though with the high water of their influence in the first forty years of the twentieth century. My own approach to the subject is modeled on theirs, so the book is as much philosophical as it is historical.
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This is a talk with audience Q&A presented by the University of Toronto's Centre for Ethics that is free to attend and open to the public. The talk will also be streamed online with live chat here [to be posted].
About the Centre for Ethics (http://ethics.utoronto.ca):
The Centre for Ethics is an interdisciplinary centre aimed at advancing research and teaching in the field of ethics, broadly defined. The Centre seeks to bring together the theoretical and practical knowledge of diverse scholars, students, public servants and social leaders in order to increase understanding of the ethical dimensions of individual, social, and political life.
In pursuit of its interdisciplinary mission, the Centre fosters lines of inquiry such as (1) foundations of ethics, which encompasses the history of ethics and core concepts in the philosophical study of ethics; (2) ethics in action, which relates theory to practice in key domains of social life, including bioethics, business ethics, and ethics in the public sphere; and (3) ethics in translation, which draws upon the rich multiculturalism of the City of Toronto and addresses the ethics of multicultural societies, ethical discourse across religious and cultural boundaries, and the ethics of international society.
The Ethics of A.I. Lab at the Centre For Ethics recently appeared on a list of 10 organizations leading the way in ethical A.I.: https://ocean.sagepub.com/blog/10-organizations-leading-the-way-in-ethical-ai