ABSTRACT
This chapter starts from the observation that sometimes reasons of love provoke an action that clearly violates a moral norm, such as when a dear friend asks you to cover up her unfaithful absence from home. In order to assess the conflict between love and morality, two questions are asked: are reasons of love somehow different in nature from moral reasons? And if they are, is it possible that one kind of reason trumps the other? One position in the literature (reductionism, as it is called in this chapter) answers the first question negatively, from which it follows that reasons of love can never trump reasons of morality because they are not of a different, competing kind. Separatism starts from a positive answer to the second question, from which they infer that love must be thought of as the source of a distinct type of reasons, irreducible to moral reasons.
After an explanation of the arguments by Brook Sadler and Michael Smith on the one hand, and by Michael Stocker, Bernard Williams and Susan Wolf on the other, an assumption shared by the two opposing standpoints is revealed: both reductionists and separatists assume that moral agents have a conception of morality that is clear and complete before love enters the scene. The chapter closes by citing some reasons for doubting that assumption.
