No abstract

This paper focuses on a recently articulated, emergentist conception of ethical naturalism and its commitment to causal efficacy, or the idea that moral properties have causal powers, along with its supporting commitment to moral causation. After I reconstruct the theory, I explain how it offers some interesting theoretical benefits to moral realists in virtue of its commitment to causal efficacy. Then, after locating some examples of moral causation in support of this commitment, I present and respond to five objections to such causation, which all threaten to undermine this support. Lastly, I consider a very serious problem that the theory faces in virtue of positing emergent moral properties as responsible for moral causation – namely, the problem of downward moral causation. I describe this problem in detail and argue that, as it stands, it does not spell doom for the theory.

No abstract

Is love possessive? That of course depends on what we mean by love being "possessive." Love may be possessive in some way yet not in others. If love is possessive in some way but not others, then in what way is it possessive, and in what ways is it not?In this paper I shall answer these questions by arguing that love is possessive in the way that loyalty is possessive, but it is not possessive in the ways that property-owners are possessive of their mere property, abusers are possessive of their partners, jealousy is possessive of the object it fears losing, or obsession is possessive of its object.By doing so I hope to shed light on the nature of love as not only possessive, but as loyal and thus as possessive in a loyal way rather than in other ways that might be confused with love.

What is love? In this paper I argue that love is a psychological syndrome, or an enormously complex cluster of psychological attitudes and dispositions that’s accompanied by a corresponding set of symptoms that flow from it. More specifically, I argue that love is an affectionate loyalty that takes different shapes across cases and that manifests itself in some set of behavioral and emotional expressions, where this set of expressions also varies across cases. After laying down three theoretical constraints that viable theories of love must satisfy, I sketch my syndrome theory of love in detail and then defend it. First, I argue that it has a strong yet defeasible claim to satisfying the three theoretical constraints. Then I defend my theory against two objections that target its extensional adequacy. I conclude that we have good grounds for being optimistic about the theory even though it calls for further development and scrutiny.