Sunday, October 19, 2008

Ok, so this is really nitpicky, but I had nothing else to write about since the whole first section was about rape fanatasies and I didn't get to the third section yet...so here we go:

Pages 175 to 177 Hurka talks about intellectual love and emotional love and which is better. He discusses and seems to settle on the idea that perhaps one is better in certain cases while the other is favorable in others. For instance, intellectual love is favorable towards knowledge, while welfarist goods and pleasures are better loved by emotional love. He then switches gears and states that they are equally good and claims that they should be proportionally distributed in all cases. I was about to argue against that when he in parentheses states in passing that if one love is favorable over another than it should than the distribution should be favored to it by the degree of betterness in the given case. That seemed to clear up the mess, and I agree with his fix and his assessment of the two types of love.

However, he then briefly discusses how one arrives at the desired state and distribution of loves towards an object. He mentions an Aristotelian view in which one exhibits emotional love and then intellectualizes about it after the fact and an anti-Aristotelian view in which one intellectually loves a good but then later arrives at an additional emotional attachment. He claims that given the same endpoint of the views, neither is preferable. Here is my nitpicky-ness. It seems to me that if a particular kind of love is favored towards an object than one should experience that love first and adopt the second sort of love after the fact. That is, in the case of knowledge in which intellectual love is favored, it seems that the distribution of loves should be arrived at in an anti-Aristotelian manor. For one to emotionally love knowledge first and then only intellectualize about the good after the fact seems to be showing improper consideration for knowledge as a good. It seems that one should first love knowledge as a good and then gain the emotional attachment afterwards. Likewise, pleasure and welfarist goods should attract an Aristotelian method of the distribution of loves. One should first have an emotional attachment to the goods and then later intellectualize about the goods and gain that type of love. To intellectually love pleasure first seems to not be proper.

I feel that Hurka would most likely agree with this assessment but simply did not wish to complicate the matter further. It is not really an argument that he couldn't easily adopt, rather I just wanted to note that it seems how one ends up at the proper distribution of loves seems to be relevant if different loves are favored in different situations.

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