Love As Valuing A Relationship By Niko Kolodny Summary
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Section 1: In the article, “Love as Valuing a Relationship”, professor of philosophy, Niko Kolodny, argues that love is a justified response to the value of relationships. I will begin, with a philosophically tenable explanation of Kolodny’s argument for why friendships are a justifiable response to value. Then, I will contrast Kolodny’s account of friendship with the “no-reasons” view advanced by Harry Frankfurt in the article, “The Reasons of Love.” Finally, I will conclude with an evaluation of both Kolodny and Frankfurt’s responses to the question, is there any rational justification for our loving the particular people that we do?
In “Love as Valuing a Relationship”, Niko Kolodny defends the relationship theory, the view that love is rendered normatively appropriate by relationships, or the ongoing history that one shares with another person: “Love is a psychological state for which there are reasons, and these reasons are interpersonal relationships.” According to Kolodny, genuine relationships satisfy three…show more content… However, there are several deeply troubling problems with Frankfurt’s argument that objects are valuable because we love them. Frankfurt identifies love with basic desires, for which there are no reasons. However, friendships seem to manifest very different kinds of caring, some friendships are superficial and some involve a very deep concern for the good of one’s friend. In order to maintain deep concern in a friendship one must participate in some kind of intentional or deliberative activity. Thus, there is something intuitively more plausible about Kolodny’s argument that reasons for concern are supplied by our historical relationship with a particular individual since Frankfurt’s discussion of higher order desires does not seem to adequately characterize the nature of