The Unlovable Parts of a Loving Society

Matei Tanasă asks if we should love the unlovable.

- Matei Tanasă

Do all people deserve to be loved? To be able to answer such a question, we must first understand its meaning. So first, what is love? The common view regarding love meets Plato’s view on it quite nicely. His view as elaborated in his dialogues Phaedo and Symposium is that love for someone or something is a type of desire. Specifically it is a desire for beauty. Yet by desiring a certain person or thing, we must also desire its conservation, its protection, and its general wellbeing – by which I simply mean, lack of pain or its non-destruction. If on the contrary, we want a certain thing or person to change, that would necessarily mean that we want it to be different from the way it is, implying that we do not love it, at least as it is. Defining love in this way does satisfy a common belief on the subject, which is that if someone truly loves you then they will accept you as you are and will not desire your alteration. Counting all this in, then, my initial question could be rephrased as: Do all people deserve to be desired just as they are?

Evidently, the term ‘deserve’ is an ethical term. If person A does deserves thing B, then it is morally correct for A to have B. So in order to answer our question, we must now also find out what we morally ought to desire. The question then becomes: is it morally right for all people to be desired just as they are?