ABSTRACT
Prevailing accounts of self-love at best capture part of the phenomenon, and they do so at the cost of great distortion. To get an apt picture of self-love, two fundamental shifts in approach are required. First, self-love is best understood as a form of valuing regard. As such, it is best understood not in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, but rather in terms of the normative structure in light of which we can speak of one’s loving oneself well or poorly. Second, and equally importantly, self-acceptance both lies at the heart of and is pervasive throughout the normative structure of self-love: without self-acceptance, none of self-love’s various characteristic dimensions (pursuit of one’s well-being, emotional openness to oneself, etc.) can go as well as they otherwise might. Contra Frankfurt, self-love does not involve wholeheartedness; one can love oneself well even in situations of fundamental ambivalence, and self-acceptance is the necessary key to successfully negotiating such situations. Although it is a mode of valuing, self-acceptance does not stand in need of justification by any antecedent value – neither the value of our characters or any other positive traits, nor the value of personhood as such. The same goes for self-love.
