ABSTRACT
The analysis of love, we argue, is deficient if love’s opposite, hatred, is ignored. Recent contributions claim that love supplies reasons: final reasons on one view, defeasible reasons on others. A plausible account, we agree, aims to capture love’s prominent role in motivation. Nevertheless, love provides neither final nor defeasible justification—for otherwise the same would apply to hatred, a line of thought we consider a reductio ad absurdum. On our account, the motivational roles of love and hatred are in many ways analogous. Both are directed at persons, objects, activities, and (dis)values. Both fuel pursuits that are at the center of people’s lives. Love and hatred come apart most distinctively, we argue, in their normative status. A compelling account of the normative status of love and hatred must appeal to whether an agent’s conception of a good life tracks value. Neither love nor hatred provide final justification, but both can be locally justificatory. Whether a given instance of love and hatred locally justifies, we conclude, depends on its relation to an agent’s conception of a good life.
