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Sense of Life

Are You Saying That You Don't Love Me?
by Joseph Rowlands

I used to be acquainted with some pretty despicable people.  There was one particular kind of behavior I found especially repulsive.  They would intentionally do things to hurt their loved ones in order to be forgiven.  They figured that if the other person would forgive them, then they must be doing it out of love.  So they'd occasionally do horrible things, just to check if they were still loved.  In fact, the more horrible the act, the more reassuring the forgiveness.  If the act was so bad, then the only possible explanation for the forgiveness was love.  And that meant the people they cared about most would be the victims, since it was their love that needed demonstrating.  And the worse they did to others, the less possible the love seemed, and so the more often they need to test it.

Okay, so that's a little twisted.  Why am I writing about sick people?  Well, because the principle is actually a common one.  This particular embodiment happens to show the principle clearly, even if it's in a revolting form.  Let's look at the principle a little closer.

The goal is to explain motivations for particular actions.  The problem with motivations is that often you have more than one reason for doing something.  If you buy a house, it might be partly as an investment, partly because you want to live in that neighborhood, partly because everyone else is doing it, and partly because you need more space.  How much does each contribute to the whole?  It's difficult to say.  One might be enough to push you into buying the house, but it might take all of them.

But what happens if one of the motivations is mysterious?  What if you don't know what causes it, so you don't know how strong it is?  How would you figure out how much of the action was based on this factor?  Well, one simple way is to subtract all of the other factors.

Your action has a cost and a benefit, and you do the action because you believe the benefit outweighs the cost.  With the other factors, you can measure what you think is the benefit for each.  If the cost is still larger than that benefit, you can attribute the rest of the cost (plus a little) to the mysterious factor.

Take an example of a man buying a car.  He chooses between two cars, both fitting his criteria pretty well.  But while one of the cars is nice, the other is red and sporty!  It also costs $20,000 more.  Now the man is having a little bit of a mid-life crisis, and really wants to look sporty.  Since all else is the same, if he buys the sporty car, then his midlife crisis is worth $20,000 to him (at least).  Every other factor was accounted for, and the difference surplus cost was attributed to the crisis.

There's another prevalent example.  The ethics of altruism.  Altruism requires self-sacrifice to be morally virtuous.  If you do something that helps someone else, but it benefits yourself as well, who can really tell if you're being virtuous or not?  So the natural conclusion is that you can't count it as being morally virtuous.  If you want that title, you have to trade with a higher cost and a lower benefit.  It's when your cost exceeds your benefit that you can talk about moral virtue.  The reason is simple.  When your cost and benefit are compared, the additional cost is attributed to your moral virtuousness.  And that means the greater the surplus cost, the greater the virtue.

And now for the point of the whole article.  There's an even more prevalent view.  We've talked about mysterious factors, and the first example I used was "love."  Forget for a moment whether it should truly by mysterious.  For many, it is.  So in real life we see people trying to verify someone's love by counting costs.  Or to put it in a more mild way, they appreciate the sacrifices made by the other person.

The process works the same as in altruism.  If you make a great sacrifice for the other person, the cost of that sacrifice is attributed to your love for the other person.  If a guy goes to an opera with his girlfriend, even though he hates opera, it's considered romantic.  He's proving his love for her by making a sacrifice.  If a girl cooks for her boyfriend's family, whom she despises, it shows how dedicated she is.

Of course, this kind of thing will happen in the happiest of relationships.  Couples will do things for each other that don't serve their immediate needs or desires.  The problem isn't doing things for each other.  The problem is in one person viewing as a benefit the other person's cost.  It's the desire to see the other person suffer in order to affirm their love for you.

The biggest problem with this "mysterious" view of love is that it breeds the opposite.  Every time one person is made to sacrifice for the other, it's undermining the relationship by increasing the cost of it.  If love is causeless, you have nothing to fear.  If you merely don't understand the cause, or the causes are indirect,  then you're probably destroying it.

It also pits the interests of the people involved against each other, with one party enjoying the hardship and toil of the other person.  And the greater the hardship, the more emotionally satisfying it is.  In some cases, one person will actually ask the other person to make the sacrifices openly, as proof of their love.  Imagine when a guy says he'd rather not do a particular task, his girlfriend saying, "Are you saying that you don't love me?"

Is this that far removed from torturing a loved one and asking for forgiveness?  Both demand a cost to prove one's love.  The differences are subtle, but hard to see which is better.  The forgiveness approach does the damage first, and then asks for forgiveness.  The demand for sacrifice asks permission upfront, which might be a little better.  But then again, the demand for sacrifice asks that the victim punish himself.

Is there any premise this is based on that could be eliminated?  I think it's the view of love as being selfless.  Love is something seen as getting in the way of one's self-interest, instead of as an embodiment of that self-interest.  It's seen as an end in itself, with no apparent cause, and certainly not one that's tied to the achievement of value.  This is what makes it possible for people to be reassured when someone makes a huge sacrifice on their behalf.  They see that love must have caused such a sacrifice, but they don't consider the effect that the sacrifice will have.  But if they continue, they will.
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