This is one of several recent posts in which I struggle with definitions of the word “love” as a way of thinking about how we define moral concepts, generally. Here I borrow the idea of “family-resemblance” from the later Wittgenstein. Sometimes, we recognize that people belong to a family, not because they all have one feature in common, but because each individual looks like many of his or her relatives in many ways. Maybe eight out of twelve family members have similar noses; a different six out of the twelve have the same color hair; and a yet another seven have the same chin. Then they all resemble each other, although there is no (non-trivial) common denominator. Wittgenstein argued that some–although not all–perfectly useful words are like this. They name sets of objects that resemble one another; but members of each set do not share any defining feature. Their resemblance is a statistical clustering, a greater-than-random tendency to share multiple traits.

A good example is “curry,” which the dictionary defines as a dish flavored with several ground spices. The word “curry” thus describes innumerable individual cases, where each one resembles many of the rest, but there is no single ingredient or other characteristic that they all share. Nor is there a clear boundary between curry and other dishes. Is bouillabaisse a curry? Clearly not, although the dictionary’s definition applies to it. Indeed, any definition will prove inadequate, yet we can learn to recognize a curry and distinguish it from other kinds of food. If we want to teach someone how to use the word “curry,” we will serve several particular examples and also perhaps some dishes that are not curries. If the student draws the conclusion that a curry must always contain coriander, or must be soupy, or must be served over rice, then we can serve another curry that meets none of these criteria. Gradually, he will learn to use the word. Even sophisticates will debate about borderline cases, but that is the nature of such concepts. Their lack of definition does not make them useless.

It seems to me that “love” is also a family-resemblance word, because there is no common denominator to love for ice cream, love for a newborn baby, love of country, brotherly love for humanity, self-love, tough love, Platonic love, making love, amor fati, philately, etc. Some (but not all) of these forms of “love” involve a high regard for the object. Some (but not all) imply a commitment to care for the object. Some (but not all) signify an intense emotional state. Dictionaries cope by providing numerous definitions of love, thus suggesting that “love” means “lust” or “enthusiasm” or “adoration” or “agape” or “loyalty.” But “love” never quite means the same as any of these other words, because we faintly recognize all of its other meanings whenever it is used in a particular way. For instance, “love” is always different from “lust,” just because the former word can mean loyal adoration as well as sexual desire.

The experience of love is complex because one has usually loved before in several different ways and has seen, heard, or read many descriptions of other loves; and these past examples and descriptions become part of one’s present experience. “Love” is a family-resemblance word that brings its family along when it visits.

When we read a literary work that vividly describes an example of love, it changes our experience of the concept. Any philosophical discussion of “love” must be a discussion of the experience; and therefore what we conclude philosophically must depend (in part) on how love has been portrayed for us in the arts. (Cf. Tzachi Zamir, Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama, p. 127).

Yesterday morning, the speechwriter and columnist Peggy Noonan published a piece in the Wall Street Journal arguing that Sarah Palin was a great choice for vice president: potentially a “transformative political presence.” Later the same day, she was recorded saying that Palin was not the best qualified person and was chosen because of “political bullshit about narratives and youthfulness.”

What’s wrong with this? Perhaps it’s evidence of a lie. In the morning, Noonan published a proposition about her own feelings toward Palin. In the afternoon, she said a different proposition about her own feelings. If the two claims were contradictory, then she lied unless she changed her mind. But I’m not sure they’re flatly contradictory, since the original column was at least somewhat conflicted: Palin, she wrote, “is either going to be brilliant and groundbreaking, or will soon be the target of unattributed quotes by bitter staffers shifting blame in all the Making of the President 2008 books.” I think that’s compatible with saying that Palin was chosen for a foolish reason. Noonan could be hopeful about Palin, yet suspicious of the reasons she was chosen. In short, the case for a lie seems weak to me.

Instead of treating Noonan’s private remarks as evidence of mendacity, we could accuse her of violating Kant’s principle of publicity: “All actions relating to the right of other human beings are wrong if their maxim is incompatible with publicity.” The idea is that one can test the rightness of an action by asking whether the actor’s private reason for so acting could be made public. If you cannot disclose the reason you have done P, you should not do P. Peggy Noonan’s private remarks suggest that she thought Palin was probably a bad choice. But she could not say that in the Wall Street Journal without hurting the Republican ticket and costing herself powerful friends. So she shouldn’t have written her Wall Street Journal column, according to at least one interpretation of Kant.

The publicity principle can seem over-demanding. Does it mean that one cannot mutter something to one’s spouse unless one would also announce it in an office meeting? The glare of publicity can expunge the safe shadows of a private or personal life. That thought gives me a little sympathy for public figures like Peggy Noonan who are caught on tape being frank with friends. (Jesse Jackson and many others have done the same.) But Kant offered his publicity principle in a book about politics (Perpetual Peace), and he qualified it by limiting it to “actions relating to the right of other human beings.” In other words, it applies to willing participants in the world of power, law, and politics–not to private individuals. By writing a column in the Wall Street Journal, Noonan committed herself to a public role. The implied promise to her readers was that she was acting transparently and sincerely in that public arena. If her private remarks show otherwise, then she violated Kant’s publicity principle.

Moral philosophy (or ethics) forms a diverse and eclectic field, about which few accurate generalizations can be made.* However, I think I detect a very widespread preference for concepts whose significance is always the same–either positive or negative–wherever they appear. In defining moral concepts, philosophers like to identify necessary and sufficient conditions, such that if something can be done, it will always be obligatory, praiseworthy, desirable, permissible, optional, regrettable, shameful, or forbidden to do it. These moral propositions may have to be considered along with other valid propositions that also apply in the same circumstances. For instance, honesty may be obligatory (or at least praiseworthy); yet tact is also desirable. Honesty and tact can conflict. Hardly anyone doubts that we face genuine moral conflicts and dilemmas. Yet the hope is to develop general moral propositions, built of clearly defined concepts, that are always valid, at least all else considered.

But what should we say about complex and ambiguous phenomena that have evolved over biological and historical time and that now shape our lives? I am thinking of concepts like love (recently discussed here), marriage, painting, the novel, lawyers, or voting. We can’t use these words in a deontic logic made up of propositions like “P is necessary.” They are sometimes good and sometimes not. We could try to divide them into subconcepts. For instance, love could be divided into agape, lust, and several other subspecies; painting can be categorized as representational, abstract, religious, etc. Once we have appropriate subconcepts, we can say that they have a particular moral status if (and only if) specified conditions apply.

The urge is to avoid weak modal verbs like “may” and “can” or other qualifiers like “sometimes” and “often.” Love can be wonderful; it can also be a moral snare. Paintings sometimes invoke the sublime; sometimes they don’t. Lawyers have legitimate and helpful roles in some cases and controversies, but not in others. A core philosophical instinct is to get rid of these qualifiers by using tighter definitions. For example, agape (properly defined) might turn out to be always good and never a snare. You always need and have a right to a lawyer when you are arraigned. All paintings by Giorgione or similar to Giorgione’s are sublime. And so on.

My fear is that the pressure to avoid soft generalizations prevents us from saying anything useful about a wide range of social institutions, norms, and psychological states. They don’t split up neatly into subcategories, because they didn’t evolve or develop so neatly. They won’t work in a deontic logic unless we allow ourselves soft modals like “may” and “can.” And yet, outside of philosophy, much of the humanities involves moral evaluations of just such concepts. For example, a great nineteenth-century novel about marriage does not claim that marriage is always good or bad, or always good or bad under specified conditions. The novel evaluates one or two particular marriages and supports qualified conclusions: marriage (in general) can be a happy estate, but it also has dangers. It is wise, when contemplating a marriage, to consider how events may play out for both partners. “Marriage,” of course, means marriage of a specific, culturally-defined type (monogamous, exogamous, heterosexual, voluntary, permanent, patriarchal, and so on). That institution will evolve subtly and may be altered suddenly by changes in laws and norms. The degree to which the implied advice of the novel generalizes is a subtle question which the novel itself may not address.

Much contemporary philosophy has a forensic feel. The goal is to work out definitions and rules that, like good laws, permit the permissible and forbid the evil. I do not doubt the value of forensic thinking–in law. I do doubt that it is adequate for moral thinking. It seems to me that the search for clearly defined and consistent concepts narrows philosophers’ attention to discrete controversial actions (abortion, torture, killing one to save another) and discourages their consideration of complex social institutions. It also directs their energy to metaethics, where one can consider questions about moral propositions, rather than “applied” topics, which seem too messy and contingent.

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What is the meaning of a principle like “causing needless pain is bad” or “lying is wrong”? These principles are not always right–think about the pain of an athletic event or lying to the Gestapo. Various explanations have been proposed for the relationship between such principles and their exceptions. Maybe lying is wrong if certain conditions are met, and those conditions are common. Or maybe lying is really the union of two concepts–“mendacium” (mendacious untruths) and “falsiloquium” (blameless misleading), to use medieval concepts. Or maybe lying and pain-causing are always bad “pro tanto”–as far as that goes. They are always bad but their badness can be outweighed.

Mark Norris Lance and Maggie Little have another theory: “defeasible generalization.”* The following are defeasible generalizations taken from science: Fish eggs turn into fish. A struck match lights. These assertions are certainly not always true. In fact, very few fish eggs actually turn into fish, and I rarely get a match going on the first try. Nevertheless, a fish egg turns into a fish unless something intervenes. Even though the probability of its reaching the fish stage is low, to do so is its nature. The privileged cases are the ones in which the egg turns into a fish and the struck match catches fire. All the other outcomes, even if they are more common, are deviant. To understand that something will normally or naturally turn into a fish is to realize that it is a fish egg.

Lance and Little make a close analogy to moral issues: “Many key moral concepts–indeed, the workhorses of moral theory–are the subjects of defeasible moral generalizations. … Take the example of pain. We believe it is important to any adequate morality to recognize that defeasibly, pain is bad-making.” In other words, it is correct that causing pain is bad, even though there are exceptions that may turn out to be common. “To understand pain’s nature, then, is to understand not just that it is sometimes not-bad, but to understand that there is an explanatory asymmetry between cases in which it is bad and cases in which it is not: it is only because pain is paradigmatically bad-making that athletic challenges come to have the meaning they do, and hence provide a kind of rich backdrop against which instances of pain can emerge as not-bad-making, as not always and everywhere to-be-avoided.” Moral discernment is grasping the difference between paradigm cases and aberrant ones. We learn this skill, but it is not just a matter of applying rules. It may not be codifiable.

This seems plausible to me. But I do not think that every moral issue works this way. Take the absolutely crucial concept of love. We might say, as a defeasible generalization, that love is good. We know that in some cases love is bad. Adultery, obsessive love, and lust are common examples (although each of these bad categories admits counter-examples that happen to be good). But maybe it is true to say that love is good just in the same way that it is true to say that fish eggs turn into fish. This principle (arguably) reveals an understanding of the concept of love even though many cases are exceptional.

Here is my worry. I do believe, as a statistical generalization, that most cases of love are good. However, I also believe that we have a tendency to overlook the bad side of love, especially if we are the subject or object of it. We have biases in favor of love that presumably arise from our biological desires for sex and companionship and from the legacy of a million stories, poems, paintings, movies, and songs in which the protagonists fall in love and are admired for it. So the principle that love is good, if treated as a defeasible generalization, a default position, or a rebuttable presumption, is likely to mislead.

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