Since it is Valentine's Day, I thought it might be a good time to bring up the question of the relationship between Utilitarianism, Agape Love, and True Love.

I define Agape Love as being a will to maximize the happiness of the beloved, where the beloved can be anyone. (Replace happiness with preferences if you're of that persuasion).

Utilitarianism recommends to maximize the happiness of everyone.

Thus, there appears to be an interesting relationship between the two.

In essence, Utilitarianism is Agape Love applied to everyone equally.

I define True Love as being a will to maximize the happiness of the beloved. Where the beloved is a single person in the universe who you choose to love more than any other.

This makes things interesting.

At first glance, True Love and Utilitarianism seem to conflict. If you choose one person to value above all others, you're not maximizing happiness fairly.

So can a Utilitarian have True Love?

I think the answer is actually yes!

How? Because of the practical realities of putting Utilitarianism into practice. The practical reality is that we human beings only have a limited time in the world. To Agape Love someone in practice requires more than just satisfying their basic needs through charity. It requires knowing them so well that you know what will make them happy, and to be in a position to bring about those world states that would create that happiness. The practical reality is that this requires a considerable amount of time and energy to achieve. Further, any time you invest in understanding one person, is time you are not investing in understanding another.

So in practice, we can either make many people a little happy, or make one person, very happy.

Does the second option not sound like True Love?

Some would argue that diminishing marginal utility would make the first option much better. But they don't factor in the advantages of a division of labour. If each person were to try to make everyone happy, the net effect would actually be worse than if each person just focused on one person to specialize in. After all, to make everyone happy, you'd have to travel a lot, and relearn for each person the basics of what preferences they might have. On the other hand, if you just focused your efforts onto one person, you wouldn't have to split your attention and be in so many places at once. As with specializing in a field of work, you would become an expert in how to make this one person happy.

It would also make sense given the amount of time you were spending together, for the other person to do the same for you. It would make even more sense if both of happened to share interests, and generally liked each other's company a lot. It would be much easier to want to make this person happy, if you valued this person a very great deal.

So what if everyone did this? The world would probably look a lot like one with lots of monogamous couples.

Does this mean we should spend all our time on just one person? Well, maybe not. Practical issues of people's desire of autonomy and independence might creep up. So really, it probably makes more sense to find a balance between focusing on your True Love, and making everyone else in the universe happy as well. But don't think that just because you are a Utilitarian, that you can't or shouldn't have True Love.

Happy Valentine's Day!

I like the topic, you're an interesting poster. I would like to read more topics that are less abstract and academic and more about what utilitarianism might look like in practice in everyday life.

I define True Love as being a will to maximize the happiness of the beloved. Where the beloved is a single person in the universe who you choose to love more than any other.

This makes things interesting.

At first glance, True Love and Utilitarianism seem to conflict. If you choose one person to value above all others, you're not maximizing happiness fairly.

So can a Utilitarian have True Love?

I think the answer is actually yes!

I think that altruistic love (what you call 'agape') is impartial by it's inherent nature. There is no felt qualitative difference between one person's basic experience of happiness and another person's so to prioritize one over the other is ultimately egocentric because doing so stems from your feelings about them and not a purely other oriented concern for their felt well-being ; which is the same as everyone else's. There is a fundamental difference between one person's preference for X and another person's preference for Y which is only one reason I don't really understand the idea of equating preference fulfillment with well-being, especially when someone can have a preference to harm themselves or others (off topic but hedonistic utilitarians can distinguish between sadism the psychology, which is disgusting, and the pleasure that a sadistic character allows, preference utilitarians have to value a sadistic preference itself. Whereas a hedonistic utilitarian could plug a sadist into a V.R machine that allows them to experience hurting other people when no one else is actually hurt - assuming for conversation that the sadist themselves would not be happier if they were more compassionate -, a preference utilitarian has to seriously consider their preference to really hurt actual people). I think that the ultimate expression of 'loyalty' is actually impartiality because it shows how much you really care about other people and not just about how you feel about them.

I think that utilitarians can be emotionally attached to or 'selfishly love' some people more than others but the ideal utilitarian would 'altruistically love' everyone equally.

How? Because of the practical realities of putting Utilitarianism into practice. The practical reality is that we human beings only have a limited time in the world. To Agape Love someone in practice requires more than just satisfying their basic needs through charity. It requires knowing them so well that you know what will make them happy, and to be in a position to bring about those world states that would create that happiness. The practical reality is that this requires a considerable amount of time and energy to achieve. Further, any time you invest in understanding one person, is time you are not investing in understanding another.

So in practice, we can either make many people a little happy, or make one person, very happy.

Does the second option not sound like True Love?

Some would argue that diminishing marginal utility would make the first option much better. But they don't factor in the advantages of a division of labour. If each person were to try to make everyone happy, the net effect would actually be worse than if each person just focused on one person to specialize in. After all, to make everyone happy, you'd have to travel a lot, and relearn for each person the basics of what preferences they might have. On the other hand, if you just focused your efforts onto one person, you wouldn't have to split your attention and be in so many places at once. As with specializing in a field of work, you would become an expert in how to make this one person happy.

It would also make sense given the amount of time you were spending together, for the other person to do the same for you. It would make even more sense if both of happened to share interests, and generally liked each other's company a lot. It would be much easier to want to make this person happy, if you valued this person a very great deal.

I think this is a great argument. But I still think there's a difference in how moral agents practically maximize happiness and an in principle preference for one person's happiness over another's. Also, wouldn't there be some scenarios in which someone you aren't as close to would benefit much more from your time and energy than someone you are close to would, that would justifying focusing on them more even if focusing more on someone you are close to works better as a general rule?

So what if everyone did this? The world would probably look a lot like one with lots of monogamous couples.

This I don't agree with.

You could argue that really intense infatuation is obsessive by nature and you can't really be obsessed with two different people at the same time because attention given to either distracts from attention given to the other but a person doesn't spend every waking moment with their partner and your partner doesn't benefit from your not spending time with someone else that you wouldn't have spent with them anyways. Infatuation also wanes over time and variety might help to maintain this. I think open relationships would be a better arrangement for people with a utilitarian mindset than serial monogamy would. I can understand why someone would rather be monogamous themselves but if you loved your partner altruistically (and never mind your partner's other partners), why would you not want them to experience the happiness they would if they developed relationships with other people (again, unlike sharing a limited resource like food, there's no conflict of interests if someone else spends time with your partner that they wouldn't have spent with you anyways).

There was a time when this topic was painfully real to me. Once after I explained something about utilitarianism my then-girlfriend asked me:
- So what, I am just as important to you as a random pig? If you had to choose between me experiencing pain, and 2 pigs experiencing the same amount of pain each, you would choose hurting me?
My answer was something like:
- Yes, you could construct a situation like that when my cold calculations would say to choose hurting you, but this would only be my brain talking. Emotionally you mean much more to me than pigs and in this situation my heart would probably win over my brains.
To this day I am not sure how honest my last sentence was. And she was somewhat hurt. So there really is some conflict here. At least some people understand love in a way that is incompatible with utilitarianism.

I also have some criticism (:

If each person were to try to make everyone happy, the net effect would actually be worse than if each person just focused on one person to specialize in. After all, to make everyone happy, you'd have to travel a lot, and relearn for each person the basics of what preferences they might have. On the other hand, if you just focused your efforts onto one person, you wouldn't have to split your attention and be in so many places at once. As with specializing in a field of work, you would become an expert in how to make this one person happy.

I disagree with this. It is pretty safe to assume that almost everyone prefers not to be hungry, not to feel pain, etc. You don't need to know subtle preferences of a person to work towards such goals via charity or something. I really feel that the time I spend with my girlfriend being happy is not a very well spent time in utilitarian sense (yet another problem of utilitarianism & love). Also, relationships are much much more complicated. Often the happiest part is in the beginning when everything is new, not when you have learned preferences of that person very well. People get bored doing the same things again and again. Conversations become less interesting, because you have told your stories and most important thoughts already...

Interesting topic (:

True Love already has a definition. Redefining it would cause confusion.

True Love does not mean valuing them more. It just involves empathy and a form of respect. These will appear to lead to you valuing them more, and you almost certainly will if you are not a Utilitarian, but they are not the same.

Empathy means that you will feel pain when the one you love is in pain. This should not be confused with automatically trying to minimize the pain of your loved one. You would still be willing to allow them to suffer, in the same way that you would be willing to suffer yourself. In a choice between your loved one suffering and two pigs suffering, a utilitarian would consider both options equal. Two pigs vs. two humans.

Respect, as I am using it here, means that you will add the weight of their opinion while deciding which choice to pick. If they're an egoist, you'll make decisions that minimize their pain more than others. In return, they respect you, and they will be willing to accept more pain if they make the decision. In the case of a prisoner's dilemma, you will cooperate. This is not because you altered your utility function. It's because you altered the strategy.

DanielLC wrote:True Love already has a definition. Redefining it would cause confusion.

Interesting thoughts, but what is the definition you are mentioning here? You are talking about it as if it was universally accepted but it would surprise me if that was the case (: Or is empathy and respect is all there is to it?

I don't know if it refers to a singe universally accepted set of emotions, but I have some idea where it is, and it has more to do with emotions than thought.

Apologies for taking so so very long to reply. I've been rather busy with finally completing my Masters Thesis.

I think this is a great argument. But I still think there's a difference in how moral agents practically maximize happiness and an in principle preference for one person's happiness over another's. Also, wouldn't there be some scenarios in which someone you aren't as close to would benefit much more from your time and energy than someone you are close to would, that would justifying focusing on them more even if focusing more on someone you are close to works better as a general rule?

Well, yes there would be some scenarios where it might be better to spread some of your time and energy out onto other people. This would actually fit will with the common sense notion that we shouldn't spend -all- our time on just our single beloved. In fact, it might make more sense to hierarchically spread out your time according to how well you know someone. So for instance, you'd put the most time and energy on the beloved, but also put some time and energy into your family and friends, because you know them as well. And of course, there might be situations where it would be easy to help a stranger without getting to know them, for instance, by donating to a particularly worthwhile charity.

This I don't agree with.

You could argue that really intense infatuation is obsessive by nature and you can't really be obsessed with two different people at the same time because attention given to either distracts from attention given to the other but a person doesn't spend every waking moment with their partner and your partner doesn't benefit from your not spending time with someone else that you wouldn't have spent with them anyways. Infatuation also wanes over time and variety might help to maintain this. I think open relationships would be a better arrangement for people with a utilitarian mindset than serial monogamy would. I can understand why someone would rather be monogamous themselves but if you loved your partner altruistically (and never mind your partner's other partners), why would you not want them to experience the happiness they would if they developed relationships with other people (again, unlike sharing a limited resource like food, there's no conflict of interests if someone else spends time with your partner that they wouldn't have spent with you anyways).

Mostly, the reason why monogamous relationships appeal to me more than open relationships is that monogamous relationships entail a stronger degree of commitment and emotional stability. If you and your partner can overcome your human psychological tendencies towards emotional jealousy and fear of uncertainty, I suppose you can try for an open relationship.

I disagree with this. It is pretty safe to assume that almost everyone prefers not to be hungry, not to feel pain, etc. You don't need to know subtle preferences of a person to work towards such goals via charity or something. I really feel that the time I spend with my girlfriend being happy is not a very well spent time in utilitarian sense (yet another problem of utilitarianism & love). Also, relationships are much much more complicated. Often the happiest part is in the beginning when everything is new, not when you have learned preferences of that person very well. People get bored doing the same things again and again. Conversations become less interesting, because you have told your stories and most important thoughts already...

Again, I don't think you should abandon charity and other people entirely. I'm just suggesting a possible reason to consider such relationships as being acceptable from a Utilitarian standpoint.

True Love already has a definition. Redefining it would cause confusion.

True Love does not mean valuing them more. It just involves empathy and a form of respect. These will appear to lead to you valuing them more, and you almost certainly will if you are not a Utilitarian, but they are not the same.

Empathy means that you will feel pain when the one you love is in pain. This should not be confused with automatically trying to minimize the pain of your loved one. You would still be willing to allow them to suffer, in the same way that you would be willing to suffer yourself. In a choice between your loved one suffering and two pigs suffering, a utilitarian would consider both options equal. Two pigs vs. two humans.

Respect, as I am using it here, means that you will add the weight of their opinion while deciding which choice to pick. If they're an egoist, you'll make decisions that minimize their pain more than others. In return, they respect you, and they will be willing to accept more pain if they make the decision. In the case of a prisoner's dilemma, you will cooperate. This is not because you altered your utility function. It's because you altered the strategy.

I chose to show a definition of true love to make sure it was clear what we were talking about, and draw the distinction between it and Agape Love. I would argue that the cultural definition is more than just a high degree of empathy and respect (which could easily describe a close friendship), but also a notion of exclusivity or special esteem.

I personally define love as wanting the best for your beloved, which as a Utilitarian means maximizing their long term happiness. If you define love differently, then my arguments don't really apply.

I kind of wrote the opening post as a interesting bit of food for thought more than as a serious argument.

This article seems possibly relevant:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/lov ... -the-heart

The author praises arranged marriages because the scientific evidence suggests they are better in many ways. The conclusion is:

I am suggesting we would be wise to emulate arranged-marriage cultures by valuing our heads as much as our hearts—starting with logic and ending with love. To that end:
* Define your standards, making sure they’re realistic and vital;
* Only date those who seem to meet them—ditching those who lack your required qualities, no matter how appealing they might otherwise seem; and
* Let yourself fall for someone from the small group that fits.
In other words, arrange your own marriage.