ABSTRACT

Lovers desire to pursue and protect their beloved's existence and flourishing for its own sake and not merely as a means to some further end. In that sense, they value the beloved's existence and flourishing as an end in itself. It is compatible with considering beauty to be an objective end in itself that people take the particular instantiations of beauty to be replaceable for each other. So the source of the beloved's objective end-hood and irreplaceability must lie elsewhere. Something that ought to be pursued in all conceptually possible situations must be something that ought to be pursued for its own sake. For things that ought to be pursued for the sake of some other end ought to be pursued in a limited range of conceptually possible situations only, namely only for as long as they continue to be related to this other end in the relevant way.